Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (32 page)

- How can words be safe? -
Some words, c-words and n-words and k-words and w-words
,
edgy and fluid words, were dangerous when they stood alone. Other words, like
child pornography
or
snuff film,
were dangerous only in combinations. But what if one used them with irony? With sarcasm or insincerity? What if one tried to reclaim the history of the word—was that even possible? Was it possible that maybe every word had the potential to be dangerous?

Was it possible no word was safe?

A year before, Lucy had attended a high school weekend retreat with Carly in a cabin in the woods in upstate New York.
It was called Common Ground, and the point was to inspire dialogue and discussion about heated topics. Carly's history teacher and the Common Ground faculty facilitator wrote
LOADED WORDS
on a whiteboard.
People, I want you to think. What words have you heard that make you upset? What kind of power do they hold?

Her teacher transcribed a list as students shouted out words they'd heard before, names and labels they may have been called or heard somebody called. Words they may have called others. The teacher divided the room by race. First, the students who considered themselves black left the room, and everyone else stayed in the room, and both groups started lists of every derogatory name, every stereotype for this race. Then all of the students who considered themselves Asian left the room, and both groups repeated the exercise. Then the students who considered themselves Latino left the room, and both groups repeated it. This was repeated for kids who considered themselves to be Middle Eastern, and then white. Each time after the lists were made, both groups took turns reading from the list they each compiled.
You must look into each other's eyes the entire time you read the words,
the teacher said.

Certain words affected only certain people. Lucy hadn't felt that with any of the words they mentioned, though Carly did.
I have eyes that work just like any white person's. I don't eat dogs. I know I don't look like my family.

At Common Ground, when they'd finished compiling the list, with all the misguided hurt in the room, Lucy had realized that the same hurt had been in the world for much longer. She'd thought, -
where do we go from here?
-

L
ucy caught a series of colds. Collected fevers thawed into her head like parasites.
There are some complications.

Shucks,
said Lucy, lightly and at liberty, trying to make what was happening funny.

I'm so sorry. It's a sign of rejection.

The
I'm sorry
caught Lucy off guard. Doctors weren't supposed to mix feelings with business, and they weren't supposed to admit to being sorry. Lucy read somewhere that a doctor saves an average of 525 lives a year. What about the people who couldn't be saved?

I'm sorry,
Lucy's cardiologist told her again.
This sort of thing just . . .
The cardiologist made eye contact with Lucy and then did something strange: blushed.
Happens,
the cardiologist ended.

Lucy thought, -
doctors feel sorry and sometimes things just happen. -

The cardiologist started talking about the idea of a second transplant. Somebody else's Heart. Lucy could barely believe this. -
Somebody else dying so I could have a third Heart? -
It suggested such selfishness.

Lucy made a phone call when she arrived home.

Uncle Noah,
she said, her voice catching on his title. Was he even still her uncle?

Lucy.
He recognized her voice.

I just got some bad news.

Oh no.

The new Heart doesn't like my body.

Baby. What are they going to do?

I'm not sure. Look for a third Heart?

Okay. Well, they got you a second one, so don't lose hope.

Are you going to forgive Uncle Sawyer?

I . . .
Noah coughed or laughed.
Does he know you're calling me?

No. But I wish you would so much, because he's been miserable. I love you, and he loves you.

I'm not sure. But it's brave of you to tell me.

I'm not being brave. It's just the truth.

That night, Noah drove to the Simone house and forgave Sawyer before he proposed to him. When they told the rest of the family the good news, Lucy feared she'd pushed Noah through guilt, which was why he slyly handed her the receipt for the two gold rings he'd bought for himself and Sawyer, from this January, in hopes of marrying in Massachusetts or Connecticut.
I was taking my time,
he explained to her, when they had a minute alone together.
I'd never want to rush into a marriage, or to do it for the wrong reasons.

M
athilde drove to the supermarket, following all of the right-of-ways.
Yield.
Mathilde yielded.
Stop.
And Mathilde stopped. She was a decent driver, she thought. Nobody had ever told her otherwise. She thought of all the other skills she assumed she had just because nobody ever told her she didn't.

The worst kind of headache throbbed in the back of her head. A growl slinked out of her stomach. She knew that she wasn't supposed to go food shopping on an empty stomach, but this was Saturday, and her dangling idleness infuriated her. She needed to be useful. If she wasn't useful, she couldn't understand what she was, or that she was.

She had two hundred dollars cash in her wallet. She could have anything: this was America. But it had become such an unpleasant task to feed her family, her three girls, none of whom had appetites. Tougher than one would think, to buy only what was necessary.

Had it not been so long ago when she was the college Mathilde, who once rascally ate nothing but pineapple for a week because her roommate told her it would make her taste good down there, whose supper often consisted of string cheese and a box of Entenmann's cookies? Maybe she could slither and slink back into the old-school, livin' la vida loca Mathilde for the night, whose spirit animal was Stevie Nicks and who
would try anything once, thrice if it felt good. What could she choose? A bagel with a container of guacamole? Some pomegranate seeds? A jar of Nutella? She'd have to eat her dinner in the parking lot, but this would be okay. Maybe she'd put on the radio, and a happy song would be playing. Listening to her body could be so nice. She liked her body in general, which wasn't too bad for a woman who had given birth to two children. -
Not too bad,
- she told herself. -
It could be worse. -
It could always be worse.

The supermarket the Simone family patronized was the Whole Foods on the west side of their neighborhood. They had a favorite everything in town—supermarket, pizza place, bowling alley, beauty salon—calling their places by their names as though they were people they had relationships with. This time Mathilde noticed herself driving to the dingier side of Babylon, north of the Southern State Parkway, parking at the Foodtown. She held her own hands as the automatic door stopped lackluster, halfway in its tracks for her.

- I'm an asshole, -
she designated herself, resisting the yen of reaching for her hand sanitizer. She should've eaten lunch with dirty hands just so she could say she knew what it was like. But hurting herself wouldn't help anybody. It wouldn't make poor people rich, stupid people smart, nor ugly people beautiful.

Mathilde looked for fruits to bag without bruises or incisions. Her family wasn't supposed to be a family who bought their fruit at the supermarket. They went to the farmers' market because they liked to support local businesses. Being this kind of family was a luxury, she knew, and this consciousness of privilege close to shamed her.

When Lucy was a baby, she called grapes
guppies
and peaches
pizzas
and avocados
chumbawumbas.
Lucy loved saying the word
often
from the moment she learned it.
We don't often eat while watching TV.
She'd also drank from a bottle until she
was six, but only at night.
I don't often go to school without my sisters.
After she started kindergarten, Lucy raised her hand at home sometimes because she was so used to doing it in school.
I don't often get sick.
Lucy was afraid of doctors, people sitting behind desks, this one episode of
Sesame Street
where somebody jumped out of a tree, and whenever Mathilde had to leave her.

Why are you going, Mommy? You don't often leave me.

Mathilde made her way to the ovo-lacto section and picked up a gallon of milk. Letting the condensation drizzle on her sullied, minute hands, she picked up a pint, then a quart. She was having a brain lapse—how big was her family? Did they all drink milk? -
Obviously, -
she told herself. Milk was good for the body; there were public service announcements for it. But now they were saying it was all propaganda from the milk industry, that farmers were feeding cows estrogen. As a result, girls as young as six were hitting puberty. Soy milk? Soy was just as bad. Almond milk? Too much sugar. And which kind of milk was the kind with the links to cancer? Camel milk? Coconut or cashew milk?

-
How soon does milk go bad? How much can we consume before then? -
The tiny procedural grooves in her brain, the memory of birthdays and shoe sizes and who liked what food, felt murky. She was replacing them with her emotional memories, the ones she liked more, the ones that belonged to her family.

She fingered her mind: -
think, Simone, think.
- Over the past year she'd habited talking to herself in her head for clarity, referring to her fractured psyche by her surname. It made her feel like a boy. Tough. So often the name Simone felt strange to her. Out of everyone in the family, Mathilde was the only one born without it. (Except Carly. One could argue that Carly was born without any name.) She thought of Spicer, her maiden name. Life without her husband. Mathilde Spicer felt like a different person, an old acquaintance she'd want to avoid running into.
This Mathilde Spicer person would hold her arm as they caught up, chummy, making Mathilde Simone feel even smaller than their talk.

Your daughter is sick? So sorry. Marriage was never that important to me,
Mathilde Spicer would say. Mathilde Spicer would be earning six figures, married to her career. She would've kept her Tony Award in her china closet. She would not have considered Mathilde's acting history anything significant: one stint on Broadway and several
Law & Order
episodes and a stand-in role on a midtier NBC show. She would've had a lover younger than she was and had a stomach you could bounce quarters off of: the tight body of a woman who's never carried other people inside it and the wardrobe of a woman who could afford to spend all her money on only herself. Mathilde Spicer would smoke jazz cigarettes and say
me, me
. Mathilde Spicer would be pure bullshit.

In the bakery section, Mathilde lifted a loaf of artisan bread the way she would a baby, in the Hearts of her palms. Mathilde couldn't resist desserts, drinks, and indulgent snacks after meals, after she was already satisfied. But she craved bread only when she felt truly, feebly hungry. It was the case with most of what she needed to live. Why did people always rush, sometimes riot over milk and bread and eggs? Why were mangoes, artichoke Hearts, smoked salmon not considered staples? Why not scones or lamb shank? What economic delicacy could one possibly conjure up on solely milk, bread, and eggs? -
French toast, -
she thought, resourcefully.

Tomorrow would be Sunday. They used to make pancakes on Sunday mornings, with fruit faces.
I'm making a polar bear pancake, with banana eyes,
Natasha had said once, and
I'm making a man named Simon,
Lucy had said.
He's like us but without the
E
. He has a mustache and goes to the prom and to the bank. He likes to say,
kiss me, baby. Carly had said,
I'm making a woman named Ziggy S. She plays gee-tar.

In college, Mathilde read a fable about a man stranded on a desert island with his parents. He cooks his own flesh, orders them to eat what remains of his body, and at least his parents are able to survive.
- Why would they let their only son do that? -
She remembered the Greek myths and literature she'd studied and how cannibalism seemed to be a constant theme among parents. There was Titan, Polyphemus, Attila, Iphigenia, Atreus. There was Tereus, Procne, and Philomena.

A memory came. Mathilde often thought she remembered things in a different way from everyone else.
My brain is sand,
she liked to say.
What happened to me is now either a dollar or a crab. And each grain is another distraction.
She'd call trying to remember something
digging,
and forgetting something
building a sandcastle.
This memory was a question her college roommates used to ask, when they'd challenge one another, asking thorny-scenario questions like
is it worse to lose an arm or a leg?

The question in question was,
if your spouse and your child were both about to fall off a cliff, and you could only save one, who would you save?

Her girlfriend had the audacity to answer without ado.
Save the hubby. After all, we could always make more kids!

You're sure of this,
Mathilde confirmed, unsure herself.