Zinc
When our daughter was three, I told my husband, Julian, that I was leaving.
“Why?” he asked. “I didn’t see this.” It was harder to explain than I expected. The ideas were there, but I had a hard time getting the words out of my mouth. “I need to make a change,” I said, frustrated with how this sounded, like the sound of a spoon against a pan. “Could we try counseling?” he asked. Julian liked solutions. “We could,” I said. “But not now.” I also liked solutions, but solutions take time. We were naked, just getting out of bed. In fact, this nakedness was part of a problem—we were so casual about it all the time that I’d look at household things, like a jumble of boxes in the garage that never made it to Goodwill, and I’d look at my husband’s sex, and each seemed equally as ordinary and unimportant. “I’m not asking for a divorce,” I told him. “I just need some time.” “You plan to come back,” he said. Julian often spoke this way, to confirm or disconfirm. He had swung his legs over the side of the mattress and pulled his robe from the row of hooks above his nightstand. I hesitated. “I think so. Yes.” I knew that my husband could stay very calm in crises. For example, in an earthquake, he would be the one who would remember which doorways were load-bearing and therefore the best to take shelter under. If trapped in debris, he would actually have a whistle with which to alert rescuers. He would produce this from his pocket along with water purification tablets, flares, high-protein snacks, and compress bandages. He would also, despite perhaps being pinned in the wreckage, be able to reach his pocket to retrieve these items, and he would know not to actually light the flares lest the spark of a match ignite the combustibles from ruptured gas lines. “What about Anne?” he asked. Her name was Anastasia, but we had followed the trend of giving girls old-fashioned names and then making the name cute, like Ellie for Eleanor, Abby for Abigail, and so on. He had not liked my idea that we could go with Dorky for Dorcas, even though I had a great aunt Dorcas. “Dorcas means gazelle,” I had told him. “I like Gazelle better,” he had said. I put on a shirt and a pair of athletic pants. “I can’t take Anne,” I said. “I think she will be okay with just you for a while. She likes you.” “Of course she likes me,” Julian said. “Not all kids like their parents,” I said. “But she likes you. You are lucky with that.” “She’s only three. She doesn’t know not to like me,” he said. “I doubt it,” I said. “This is strange, Laura,” he said. “I feel like this is the first I’ve heard of it. I feel like this is sudden.” He cinched his robe. It was plaid. I wanted to say, You have elected not to listen. I wanted to say, By the time you get home in the evening, I have had so much vodka that I don’t care. I wanted to say, Enjoy the second shift! I would have meant any of these things, but in truth, Julian was kind to me and to Anne, in an old-fashioned way—he came home late and often excused himself to our shared office to work some more, but I attributed it to poor time management skills and a man’s allegiance to work. And I also wasn’t sure how much any kind of explanation would help. What could I say, really, to help explain why I did not want to wake up next to him? “Do you want some coffee?” he asked, always civil. I nodded. Julian tightened his robe again as he passed me, heading for the kitchen. I had given him the robe when we were new. In fact, I had stolen it from someone who I’d thought of as my last hurrah before settling into a serious life. I’d let the guy pick me up at a bar; he was dressed nicely with a pretty smear of grey around his temples. I still liked that look—someone who is just on the cusp of getting older. There is something about our turn from one place to another, like girl to young woman, man to gentleman, which so turns us on. As Julian rummaged around in the kitchen—grinding the beans, measuring water—I remembered how I’d casually lifted the Nordstrom bag that held what was now his robe on my way out of that stranger’s house. There had been a gift receipt inside, and Julian had been ultimately too polite to exchange it, even though the colour was not exactly right for him. After we had our coffee, awkwardly, and Julian went to work, I did leave. It was only for a week and a half, not enough to really amount to much. I went to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula—the arm of the state that sticks out into the Pacific. On a map it looks like the edge of paper, torn the way children without scissors will, with a bead of saliva down the crease, ragged and wet. It was October, so the water and the sand and the sky were all very grey. I didn’t do much but drink wine on the porch of a dumpy condo. I watched the surf blur into the coastline and clouds, and I considered how maybe sameness did not have to mean stasis. Then I went home, and when I unpacked my bag, I put it back in the closet in the same place, and I hung all of my clothes on the same hangers.
I refused to believe it was something about marriage. It was something about us and the everyday: the longer Julian and I were together, the more I developed indifference to the body. We’d been passionate once, but increasingly, I thought of this like the messes that were accumulating in more and more corners the longer we lived in our house. When we first moved in, the immediacy of any kind of clutter was unbearable to me; later, it became inconvenient; finally, there was a settling.
Our bodies, like any other piece of household effluvia.
Here is the stove.
Here is the laundry.
Here was my breast.
It was almost like a miracle that we’d conceived Anne, not a sacred one, but one of statistics. I felt a kind of guilt about it, with so many people who struggled, who timed their copulations around ovulation and injected themselves with the urine of women already pregnant.
Early in the pregnancy, I took down a framed painting from one wall in our office and leaned it against the opposite wall. I was only going to move it—it was too heavy, made the room feel like it was tilting. When Julian asked me what I was doing, he said that it was just me, that the room was certainly not tilting.
“I said it feels like it’s tilting, not that it’s actually tilting.”
“I don’t see it,” he said. “But I don’t care if it gets moved.”
“Maybe you’re used to it,” I said. “Like people who have one leg longer than the other and they never really know until they go to a chiropractor because their backs hurt.”
Julian gave me a blank look.
“They think it’s their backs because they’re used to the leg,” I said.
“If one of my legs were longer than the other, I would know,” Julian said.
I gave him this. He was a scientist; he might have been right. He might have already measured.
“I’ll let it sit for a few days,” I said. “We can see how it feels.”
Years later the painting remained un-hung. His mother had given it to us; it had been in her house for many years and had been bequeathed to us with much ceremony. A landscape in a gold laminate frame; it was the kind of thing that gets thrown out when people pass, but for now it was with us.
Occasionally I would vacuum underneath and behind it, where it was making an ever-deepening groove against the plush. Sometimes I would even clean the glass, but I got used to the way it looked in the office, and finally, Julian stacked a box of files in front of it.
Our collections, our dust in the atria.
Even after Julian’s mother died we did not throw it out, as by then it had become another layer in our unsteady foundation, a sediment of glass and old shoes and dirty sheets.
There were times that I thought sex with Julian might be like exercise or healthy eating or reading the classics or driving a stick shift—things that can be hard to get started on but become easier with practice, stimulating even. Or like growing a vegetable patch—once the long wait for spring is over and the seeds have been started, the transplanting complete, the frequency of watering gauged, the garden is sustaining. In my last semesters of college, before I met Julian, I’d spent a year feeling a little predatory. It wasn’t that I pursued anyone relentlessly or illegally or was especially horrible toward men, but I would meet them and I would sleep with them. I had so much energy for this and no energy for anything else. It wasn’t only the excitement of the casual, it was also the pitch. One clear note that did not sustain. Then we met. He was in the student union. All I did was say hello to him, in passing. He was wearing the same university sweatshirt that I was. He said hello back to me. He said, “Didn’t we take an astronomy class together?” “Yes,” I said, though I did not actually know if this was true. “I thought you were familiar,” he said. “Yeah,” I said. I was familiar. I was a familiar, ordinary person wearing brown hair and a college sweatshirt. And when I saw him again, a few days later, we again exchanged hellos, and he invited me for coffee. “Is that too weird?” he asked. “I never think coffee is weird,” I said. “I love coffee.” This was true. So we went to a local place, and then later we took a drive and ended up fucking in the back of my car, which was a hatchback with the backseats perpetually down. “I didn’t really mean to go that far,” Julian said to me when we were done. “Me neither,” I said, but I had. I was young then, but I wasn’t an idiot—I’d grown up on a farm, so I didn’t believe these things just happened. I mean that I believed in the pure pull of biology, but that even an old milk cow will dance around a little for the aging bulls if she is open, whether she can really carry a calf or not. By then I’d already had many of these kinds of lovers—these easy, one night men. They were not difficult to find. Julian was different. He insisted that he take my phone number. He insisted that I accept his. He called me every day for a week. As I saw more and more of him, he calmed me. He was level. Indeed, his legs were perfectly plumb. We said our vows quietly, at the courthouse, with no one but the state-appointed witness in attendance. I took these things to be a sign of love—the inward turn, the lack of declaration in the smell of the clerk’s triplicate papers, the quiet legality. I thought this was the other side of all those uncomplicated fucks—an uncomplicated husband made with a simple signature. I held Julian’s hand on our way to a late lunch. It was April, and misty. I was a damp bride in bad shoes. The dim light of the afternoon fell onto Julian from the side, and the light off him was just as dim, a prism without enough angles to refract.
Later in my pregnancy, when Anastasia had grown enough for her features to come through clear on a sonogram, I’d wondered if Julian was really her father. Then, he was working as a geologist at an environmental organization. I hadn’t been unfaithful to him, but I did have trouble accepting that this man of precision and exacting recycling standards was really capable of fathering a girl with such a fine, watery face. It wasn’t until the contractions came on strong—after Julian’s workday but before he had changed out of his suit—that I was sure she was half his. She was already a girl made of accidentally impeccable timing, a trait she must have gotten from her father, so it seemed appropriate that she arrived without inconvenience. She arrived early in the morning, just as the spring sky was lighting up. I was surprised at how quickly it was over. There had been part of me that had wanted to give birth at home, away from the chill of a hospital but I had also, growing up, seen many births—mostly of cattle and swine—and, more than making me comfortable with the idea, it terrified me. Though it usually doesn’t, much can go wrong. There can be a great deal of screaming. There can be blood. I felt close to the idea that birth is a place where two worlds are opened at the same time. I was happy she was born in the morning and not at twilight. Julian decided that he would go to work directly, unshaven and in the same clothes as the day before, even though the investors were coming “You could stay here,” I said to him. “You should rest,” he said. “And your mother will be here before too long.” “But they’ll understand, Jules, if you take a day off,” I said. “I’m fine,” he said, “I can get through my day.” It would only be fair to say that the kiss he planted on my forehead was sweet, that he closed the door gently on his way out. Julian was kind and Julian was smart, but there were certain things he could not see, like that meetings could be put off for an afternoon. I knew he was working for us—for the three of us, and I knew he probably didn’t really want to go but felt stuck. And I didn’t want to sleep either, for the first time in too long. I wanted to be awake with him and with our new girl. We were assured sleepless nights were normal, and I breast-fed normally: for a year, somewhere between the minimum requirements and the cut-off of getting too old for it in public. I worked at a university, so I took my maternity leave and then went back. Anne hit her developmental marks. Julian started a consulting firm with a friend. By the time we celebrated her second birthday, I had completely lost any ability to get angry. So when I left him, even for such a short time, it wasn’t out of rage. I hadn’t been able to get mad at the way being a mother had changed things, and I hadn’t had a chance to rail against the inequalities of female versus male parentage—really, I had it pretty easy. Really, there wasn’t much for me to go on a tear about. And if there was, I couldn’t feel it. The household and my life with Julian had gone infestive. Grime in the ventricles, earth in the aorta. I still had some friends and I was deeply envious of them. Instead of sinking into the dust bunnies of their adult life, they’d warmed to it and kept the corners swept clear. Mostly, when I was gone from my husband and daughter, I missed my daughter. And from my perch on the condo porch at the seaside, I hoped that he would find her difficult. I knew she would spend most of the time at daycare, which she liked. I knew that Julian would spend most of his time at his office, which he liked. I also knew even with a short absence he would take to her more, because he would have to. I wanted this both because I thought Anne deserved a present father and because I didn’t want Julian to think he could be spared the emotional life of girls. He didn’t get to just disappear into his work. She was not a demanding child, but she was still a child, and there were things that needed to be done, like picking her up on time, and carefully combing her hair, and shielding her from the boring ugliness of adults.
When I came back, nothing had changed. I shouldn’t say I came back. I should say I unpacked my suitcase. In the evenings, we still sat silently across from each other at the table, and we listened to our daughter chirp away about her day in the language that only we three shared. I had learned that I’d been wrong about my reasons for staying married to Julian. So far I didn’t know how to do anything about it. For years I had thought that his patience and his composure had been good for me. He had tamed me and I thought this was trust. Now I felt dishonest. I thought I still knew the difference between the flash of heat that comes with infatuation and the enduring kind of devotion that can keep two lives together. And Julian was very devoted. He could have easily filed papers at any time. He knew the kinds of people who were good at these things. I knew the kinds of people who drank too much in an attempt to self-medicate their ennui, and who called it such. Julian’s friends had walls of dry-cleaning protecting them against all the things that might really be going on; mine had their jobs with students and in the sheltered world of not-for-profit.
I wasn’t entirely sure that having Anastasia had made me a better person. It had made me a different person. Without her, I might have been able to leave Julian for longer. I might not have noticed how slow and predictable our patterns had become, how our blood had turned to dirt. I thought maybe I could finally put the picture back up in the hallway or do some intense organizing—change the weight of the house, the slope of it. When I’d gotten new tires on my car, I’d seen the technician wedge little lead weights between the rim and the rubber. Julian described to me the difference between static and dynamic balance and that most shops were converting to zinc instead of lead because of the environmental impact. Very simple and clever. I needed some of these.
