TUCSON, JUNE 2020, 109°
QUARANTINE WEEK 15, GESTATIONAL WEEK 32
After N and I have slowly moved the last of our things to the new house, I go back to the old apartment to clean. I am slow and get tired easily, so this takes two separate days, though the apartment is barely six hundred square feet. I do a better job than is necessary to get our deposit back, scrubbing grout and baseboards in a deep squat and, when my hips get tired of that, on my hands and knees. I do not completely understand why I am dutifully performing this labor, only that it is an act of service I feel compelled to carry out. I clean things I never cleaned when we lived there: the inside back of the oven, behind the fridge, the windowsills under the blinds. I clean so much of our hair, mine long and straight and his thick and curly, that the vacuum cleaner seizes up.
When I am nearly finished and have schlepped our last items down to my truck, I step into our bedroom. The empty space is flooded with sunny light, warm on the blond hardwood, white walls gleaming because I have scrubbed them with vinegar. It is a small, simple room, in a small, simple apartment—the kind of apartment I imagine my parents lived in before I was born, when my dad was in law school and my mom was working at a bank counter to pay both shares of Manhattan rent. The kind of apartment they told me and my siblings about as a sort of cautionary tale of where you have to live if you never make any money. I have been so comfortable here. If not for the baby, I might have stayed indefinitely, paying the cheap rent and not having very much to clean.
The new house is big and rambling, covered in thick-grouted Saltillo tiles and banked by adobe brick walls, a haven for dust and grime, a place that is a real project to keep clean and tidy. I hate cleaning but I cannot relax in an unclean space.
In the empty bedroom, nostalgia rushes into me, and I am suddenly filled with a sort of overwhelm that makes my throat swell in the direction of crying. I think about all the things that have happened here, in this space, mostly in this very room.
N, still new to me, coming inside and sitting down, me thinking that we would have sex and he would leave and it would be whatever, but instead we kissed a little bit and then started talking and I heard myself telling him, in an unvarnished tone, things I usually conceal very carefully. I heard him telling me things men don’t often speak of, things people don’t usually tell each other. We talked about fear and feelings and alienation and pain, and we did not have sex, and when he left I felt closer to him than I ever had to anyone whose body I had shared.
N, a month or so later, more known but still new, walking through the door right behind me with a small bag in his hand, an overnight bag because he would spend that night with me, our first night together. Me, uncharacteristically nervous, and then not nervous at all, meeting this person who felt less like a stranger than anyone I have ever met before or since.
Us, waking up in this same warm blond light the next morning, both inside the same happiness at the same time, both feeling so human we could not stop grinning at each other.
N, moving underneath me with his hands on the small of my back, breaking the silence of the room to say I love you, and me, crying because of how much I believe him, telling him I’ve been whispering that to you after you fall asleep for weeks.
N, moving in with a few small flat boxes and a pair of ski boots and a single bag of clothes.
Me, hurting myself at the gym to the point of crutches, N arranging snacks and water and electronics around my perch on the couch and never once complaining about becoming my caregiver.
Me, nearly a year and a half later, alone early in the morning with a bag full of pregnancy tests, watching lines appear one after another after another, dropping down to my knees and pressing my forehead to the bathroom’s tile floor and breathing Please be real, then louder, until I was almost yelling, Please, please, please. His face when I told him, a few hours later, I think I’m pregnant: happy and overwhelmed in equal measure, saying I know.
In this apartment we loved each other, took care of each other, made our baby. I feel stupidly sentimental—the apartment is just, after all, a space, a set for a play that is still going on, but I feel feelings rise up and engulf me and I don’t have the exact right words for them, happy and excited and nostalgic and grateful, yes, but more too, something woven between.
I run one last pass with the vacuum, press my hands together and do a funny little bow and say Thank you, house, lock both doors, and leave.