Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman

Author:Kate Braverman [Braverman, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-249-3
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

14

The hospital doors snapped open for me, a kind of glass mouth. An older man sat hunched and weeping on the grass near the emergency ambulance driveway. No one looked at him. He was still there as I drove out of the parking lot, a small mound lost beneath the shadows the building cast.

I walked the three steps up to my porch. My cousin Rachel had written. I sat on the porch and read her letter twice. Then I telephoned Jason.

“I miss you.” I paused. Did I miss him? “I missed you last night.”

“I’m here now. Do you want me now?”

Now, now. I said yes.

Despite everything, when Jason offers me a piece of a day or a night, I feel six years old again. I am driving with Daddy in the old gray Hudson. He’s going to buy me an ice cream cone. Daddy is taking me to the circus, the aquarium, the zoo. When Jason offers me anything I feel whole. I feel loved.

I studied my house. The last vestiges of Gerald Campbell had been thrown away. Jason’s canvases were stacked neatly near the front door. The house was thinning. I could strip it down further.

There were the gifts from Francine that I no longer needed, had never needed. All the hard hooks and little anchors she gave me. They were attempts to weigh me down to the thing she called the real world. When Francine talked about the real world she made it sound as if she held the patent.

I assembled hand-painted vases Francine had bought on business trips to Rome and Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Paris. If I could just cut back the unnecessary shape and mass, the sense of past inhabitation, perhaps I would be able to understand. Perhaps with the walls and floors free from the weight of furniture and tourist artifacts, the truth would snap loose, dusted off, perfectly clear.

“You can’t do this to me,” Jason said. He was stunned. It was a year ago or two years ago, after our reconciliation.

“Do what?” I asked softly.

I knew precisely what. I had been gone that night. I had been gone the better part of a week with another man.

The other man meant nothing. He was irrelevant, a kind of driftwood. He didn’t stop the pain that was Jason. Beneath the surface weren’t men the same, encased in their separate sets of idiosyncrasies? I no longer had the ability to memorize a new set of boundaries. Jason had burned me out.

“Where have you been?” Jason demanded.

“You don’t want to know,” I said softly, evenly, enjoying the tension in his voice.

Jason hung up. He opened the front door of my house without knocking. He grabbed me by my shoulders and pushed me against the wall.

“Bitch,” he hissed. “I want to know.”

“I was with someone.”

“I know that, bitch. I can smell it.”

Once I had smelled it on him, too. It was like an invisible stain, the small tendrils of someone else, a faint impression left on the skin, a kind of resin.

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