My refusal to compose came to be considered the trumpet of war. There was immediate escalation. Marie-Anne harmed me the best way she knew how: she hurt herself. She refused to go to the gym, refused to do her breathing exercises, refused to write down the daily list of things she was grateful for, and ate foods high in carbohydrates and sugar. In the bathroom she didn’t let herself break out into song. She never stomped her feet and moved her hips to music as the doctor had suggested. She didn’t call her friends or even go out shopping. It was all aimed at heightening her cortisol.
She ballooned, again. The expansion started on the face, as it did always, and the cheekbones were submerged. Within a week her shoulders widened, her hips and thighs thickened, and there was a dour pudginess to her. In two weeks she went from brick to sponge. In the third week her hair started thinning, she developed acne on her face, a rash on her inner arm, and lesion-like bruises on her body. I glimpsed them in the bathroom mirror before she had a chance to close the door.
In the first few weeks of her vengeance she was reluctant to give up the years of progress, so she had, at least, eaten home-cooked meals. But by week four she ordered out every time. Greasy fries, greasier chicken fingers. All the salads and gluten-free things in the cupboards expired and grew stale and got thrown out. The only healthy thing she did was eat the vitamins from the unmarked bottle.
She had been good for so long. And now, while rendering me responsible, she had thrown it all away. She was taking us back to where we had been three years earlier. Except this time we didn’t have any of the warmth, any of the trust, any of the fidelity that had allowed us to struggle together. This time she wanted my love turned into pity, and from pity an obedience to emanate. She wanted my obligation, not my ardor.
One evening during the fifth week she tore into her closet with scissors in hand, and disemboweled and exenterated all of her new clothes, the ones that didn’t fit anymore because she had put on twenty pounds. She cried loud and wheezing, and sitting with my back against the wall in the hallway, hearing the slashing and the tearing, I cried too. Those weren’t just clothes she was slaughtering. They were poems, they were the beauty of her recovering body, they were the memories of our united resistance against the insensitive and cruel imbalance inside her genes. Once, we had been good enough to bond and beat back millions of years of mitochondrial mutations. Now we weren’t even good enough to talk.
One of these days she or I would pack our bags and go. It seemed as inevitable as the tyranny of cortisol.
* * *
My mother had been a subtle woman, indirect, of few words. Much of this had to do with her aborted career as a journalist in the Old World. Once idealistic and activist, she had been silenced by some landed interests — something involving a picture of a rape room — and from that day onward had taken to speaking in a roundabout way, fearful of persecution, cautious to a fault. Much like the Pilgrims of yester-centuries, she brought her circumspect inclination with her to America and carried it into the relationship with my father and then to communication with me. “Look, there is a grocery cart in the middle of the parking lot. I wonder if it’ll hit a car.” That was how Mother taught me morality. No pointing to codes or tablets or commandments. Just a roundabout way. I understood why she had tucked the Koran into a corner of the house. Rather than having a conversation with me, it was better for her if I just had that conversation with myself.
The one time that Mother had dropped her preference for the oblique occurred the last time she visited. Marie-Anne had been unwell for some time. We weren’t sure it was a cortisol spike then and had been giving her a diet that might resist hypothyroidism, the other possible diagnosis. Mother — as I called her — had gone with me to Reading Terminal to help buy some foods containing iodine, omega-3 fats, selenium, zinc, and vitamins A, B, and D. After she made a joke about how the letters a-b-d formed the root for a West Asian word for slave, she said that she needed to discuss Marie-Anne.
“I do not want you to be offend,” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“She should not look like this,” Mother said, puffing her cheeks and jutting out her elbows. “It is not good in marriage.”
“What isn’t good?”
“Bad appearance,” Mother said. “It will kill feeling. It is known that men need attractive.”
“She’s beautiful. You remember her at the wedding.”
“She was. But even then, very big and tall.”
“She will be fine.”
“What if it takes years? What will happen to you? A man cannot be with a woman who looks off.”
“Nothing will happen to me. I love her. We will stay together.”
“What if she never deflate?”
By this time I grew angry. I wanted to make assertive exclamations. To tell Mother how upsetting it was to have this sort of skepticism cast upon our love. It reminded me of what Mrs. Quinn had done. She had also doubted me on the basis of physicality. In her case it was something I lacked. In my mother’s case it was something Marie-Anne lacked (or, rather, accumulated). I concluded that both mothers were the same. They were not comfortable verbalizing the true bases of their prejudices so they highlighted alternative shortcomings in their children.
That conversation at Reading Terminal changed our relationship. I could see, driving home that day, as we wound through the falling cherry blossoms in Fairmount, that Mother realized she had rattled me. Remorse had been writ all over her, like fur on a wolf. But I didn’t believe it was the right kind of remorse. She was aggrieved that I was upset. She was not upset with herself for her position. The recognition prompted me to adopt a posture of hermetic silence toward her, the same kind of taciturn stance that had marked her life. I maintained my silence throughout the duration of her trip.
Two weeks after she got back to Alabama, she passed away.
It was somewhere during that trip that Mother had booby-trapped my apartment.
CHAPTER FIVE
For the first time in our marriage, Marie-Anne and I ignored each other’s birthdays. Marie-Anne gained reprieve from the apartment by going to the MimirCo offices as frequently as she could. It seemed like she was always in Virginia. Perhaps it was a prelude to her finding a place there.
Loneliness brought memories of Richard Konigsberg. He had been the one I used to get drunk with when things with Marie-Anne went sour. He had not been the biggest proponent of the institution of marriage; but when it came to Marie-Anne, he made arguments that impressed upon me the importance of stability and structure. He always said that making it in America was a multigenerational enterprise, and that it wasn’t in the cards for me to achieve both social advancement and freedom at the same time. I had to choose the former. “It will be the next generation that will get to have the benefit of doing whatever they want,” he’d said. “It’s for them that your sacrifices must happen. It’s for them that you must marry a good girl from a good, established family and stick it out.” That sacrifice was the primary reason I wanted to have children. Their existence would legitimize the effort I had put into maintaining a loving relationship in the face of the longest odds. They needed to be born so that I could tell them all that I had done for them, much the same way my parents used to tell me all that they had done in order to leave their home country and make it in America. Progeny was how a debtor became a creditor.
Valentine’s Day came and went without acknowledgment. Without Richard to mope with I reached out to Ali Ansari. When he learned that I didn’t have plans with Marie-Anne he sent me a text with red hearts in it and announced that he was going to take me out. “Something to offset the internment!”