Everybody Has Everything

“We came the other way.”

“I hope it means we can get more funding for the library,” said Diana.

They finished their water and smoothed their skirts, but as they were walking toward the door, Ana stopped: “What did you mean, functional? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Ana,” she said, a quick, deep-voiced response that suggested Ana was right to press further. “It’s difficult to be a mother.” She paused. “Don’t tell James I said that.”

Ana shook her head.

“It is more than just giving up your freedom, or your marriage, in many ways. It’s a loss of an idea of who you are. And they will tell you: ‘Oh, you get an abundance in return, you get it back, it’s simply different.’ But that’s not quite true. What is true is that you are altered, and I suppose it depends who you were to begin with, if you have the kind of genetic structure that can withstand such change. Does it make sense?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” said Ana, caught in Diana’s unyielding gaze. “Did you feel like you’d been changed enough already before you had kids? By the war?”

Diana flinched and looked away, and Ana recognized a misstep on her part. They would remain in the realm of abstractions.

“Perhaps in some way,” said Diana. “I sympathize with you. I can’t say I regret my children. Of course I care for them. But I do sometimes wonder what was lost to me.”

Footsteps outside the door passed, and Ana felt as if she was about to be caught in something illicit. James would never believe this; he always said that his mother had locked away the sentient part of life. She had once cut her hand on a can opener and strode into the living room where the boys were playing, a newspaper wrapped to her wrist, blood speckling the ground behind her. “There has been an accident,” she a

And now this confession and warning by the kitchen door. What was Ana to do with it? The illness in her head bloomed.

The door swung open, and Fi

“Hungry,” he said. Diana moved to meet his hunger. Cupboards opened and drawers rattled and food came forth for the boy, pieces of cheese cut in tiny squares, which he placed in his mouth with chipmunk propulsions, humming cheerfully, oblivious to the eyes of the women. Ana watched her mother-in-law, imagining that she was seeing in Fi

Ana looked upon the boy and rooted around for some kind of feeling. It was there, but not the texture or the size she sensed was required. Still, she could feed him if he was hungry. Not all women could do this. The apartments of Ana’s youth had empty refrigerators, still slimy from the previous tenants, burned-out bulbs. As a teenager, she was often a di

There had always been food. A bagel wrapped in a paper towel stuffed in her backpack. The remains from the doughnut store, or later, the catering company where she had worked as a teenager. Sitting on the couch late at night, eating pasta salad from take-out containers with plastic forks, her mother telling her about her Ph.D. that she would never finish. Poetry.

“I’m not feeling too well,” said Ana, and Diana nodded, as if it were a given.

“Come, Fi

“Up,” said Fi

Ana nodded at him. Diana said softly: “Ana, he wants you to pick him up.”

“Oh, of course,” said Ana. She bent and pulled him up, his legs tightening around her waist like a spider trapping a fly, but his hands on her neck were loose and soft. Ana rubbed his back, felt the warmth of him bending into her, his sweetness drowned out by her sadness, her humming knowledge that hers was not the body he needed, that they were caught together in this web of compromise. A smell of orange cheese in her throat.

Ana lay in bed with the lights out, trying to still her head, which seemed to keep pushing away from her, as if trying to unscrew itself. The fever came quick and angry, leaving her drenched and shaking under the duvet.

James came in with aspirin in one hand and a tall glass of iced juice in the other.

“Turn out the light,” she said, but there was no light on.

Fi

James tried to imagine what played over in Fi

Ana moaned slightly in the dark and James straightened the duvet at her shoulders. He looked over to see Fi

James took Fi

“Ana,” he said. “Want Ana.” He slipped behind James, knocked on the door, loudly.

“Fi

Fi

James picked him up, and he went soft in his arms, put his fingers in his mouth and began sucking.

James carried Fi

James was used to being a study in contrast to Ana: He didn’t mind mess, could sleep in knotted bed sheets until Ana, a

Oh, he missed them all, even Emma, young Emma and that fleeting moment of debauchery that might be his last. In a few years, she would lose her glimmer, and her love of risk, and become a mother to somebody. Getting older was infuriating. He needed the steady footing of his youth, the certainty of opinion, and it was gone. James took a deep, quivering breath.