9/27/04
Dear Al,
How are you? How is little Lizzie? How’s being back at work? It must feel like you’ve had your brain handed back to you now you’re allowed to discuss more than poop and potty training!
Sorry, I only tease. But you need to talk to Marc. I know he wants another kid and I know you want to give him what he wants, but you can’t do that to yourself, babe. And you can’t just keep taking birth control and not telling him. Your desires are just as important as his—more so when it involves your body. He needs to respect what you’ve gone through, what you’ve sacrificed. I mean, it’s enough for any woman, but you in particular. Becoming a mom after what yours did to you is not nothing. You’ve achieved an enormous amount. I don’t know many women who would be able to move on from that. I remember your face in that tattoo shop in Boystown as your scar was finally replaced by something beautiful. I remember you saying you never wanted kids. I know all that’s changed and Lizzie is the light of your life, but just because you changed your mind once doesn’t mean you can’t trust it now. You’re in a great place: you have a child and an opportunity to reclaim some of yourself. Don’t give it up because Marc has some idea about the perfect happy family.
I’ll shut up now, I’ve said my piece.
I don’t want to jinx anything, but I too am finally in a positive place. I feel like I’m finding a balance between the things I love. I’m in the final stages of tying pretty pink ribbons around something to present to a gallery, and I also have this other, tiny piece that I initially thought was a bit of fun that’s totally spiraled and become this thing every motherfucker’s talking about. I was looking through the videos I made with my mom a year or two ago and felt the urge to play with the project some more. I came up with this installation board game based on the film Terms of Endearment. (Have you seen it? It’s this terrible, totally wonderful film that everyone loves here—all schmaltzy, weepy, family stuff with a mother and daughter who fall out and marry and divorce and get cancer and make up and fall out and make up and et cetera, puke-my-guts-out-and-wipe-my-face-in-it, et cetera. Won all the Oscars, obviously.) I pitched it to PS1 and they had this last-minute opening, so I set it up within a couple of weeks. I thought it’d be there for ten days and that’d be it, but it’s been two months now and every day more and more people seem to be schlepping across the river to sit and play my game. It’s a simple dice-roll thing for moms to play with their daughters, but each square asks them to face something personal about their relationship, to share a secret or ask something they’ve been afraid to say. I figured hardly anyone would be willing to volunteer, but apparently most days there’s a queue. All these assholes acting out their private therapy sessions for the crowd. They’re paying me to keep it going and there’s word a couple of museums are interested. Plus I got a write-up in The New York Times and now every snot-nosed journalist wants a piece of me. (I’m being very coy and telling them I’m “unavailable for interview.”)
Also, the advertising house where I used to have my Reception Gallery contacted me a few days ago to tell me they have companies interested in “alternative’ advertising that would like to work in conjunction with a performance artist. They’re paying me just for a phone consultation, so if all goes well this could be a nice little cushion.
It’s so exciting to feel busy and stretched again, like waking up after a long sleep. If we were together, we could have shrieked and giggled and danced in celebration of our new freedoms. Perhaps this is our year, Al.
Am xx
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2004
I pedaled furiously up Heslington Road, cursing the cars that crawled up my back wheel to overtake then slammed on their brakes right in my face when they reached a speed bump. I was thinking of my nine o’clock seminar and that we needed to send in the meter readings this week and that we were running low on Calpol and if I was going to the chemist there were probably other things we needed so I should make a list and—and my legs slowed their pumping as something occurred to me and I tried to remember the date and count backward and think when was the last time.
“Watch out!” shouted a pedestrian I’d just cut off on the zebra crossing, pulling my focus back to the road. I checked behind me, lifted my right arm, and pulled across the traffic toward campus. I locked my bike in the usual place and hurried to my class.
It was almost three by the time I managed to extricate myself from students and departmental meetings, and then only for half an hour. I hurried through the colleges to the tiny campus supermarket, praying they’d have what I needed. Having to ask the pimply student to retrieve the test from behind the counter was mortifying and I wondered why nobody had thought to put dispensers next to the tampons and pheromones and condoms in all university loos. I was tight on time, but keen for as much privacy as possible, so I took the lift up to the fifth floor of the library and headed for the toilet behind the stacks.
I peed and waited, gingerly holding the plastic stick in a wad of toilet roll. I counted backward again, trying—and praying—to remember if I’d bled over freshers’ week and just somehow forgotten. I thought about the strip of pills hidden in the bottom of my makeup bag and wondered if I could possibly have forgotten, if there was a day I might have taken one late. How could I have been so careless? Marc had been going on about Lizzie needing a playmate for months. I’d argued it was too soon, there was too much going on, we needed to focus on work and ourselves for a bit, but Marc had made those puppy dog eyes and somehow we’d agreed to “wait and see” and “let nature take its course.” I hadn’t told him I’d been renewing my contraceptive prescription and thinking we should leave it at least another year, maybe more. Marc and I were both only children, I argued to myself—was it really so bad? I loved Lizzie to pieces, but I’d just got my life back. Things were starting to happen. These past few weeks I’d remembered I was more than just a pair of tits and a soothing voice, more than just a mother.
I stopped waving the stick and looked down at the two blue lines.