If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black

Author:Robin Black [Black, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-679-60368-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

After he’s gone, I am grateful, in bed alone, for the fuzzy muting of all that wine. In general, I have become careful about drinking too much, too much of the time. There were months after Joe died, months that were a little drowned, a little blurred, in retrospect. Liquor certainly fueled some of the loveless loving my body sought and found with men I barely noticed, except to pummel them in bed. But I don’t fool around like that anymore. And I watch it now, with alcohol. Every once in a while, though, that softening patina an extra glass of Chianti can give, that velvet cloth it lays over every jagged edge, evokes a kind of humble gratitude in me.

I can hear music humming still in Alyssa’s room. She came in late, full of stories about her friends. I tried to listen with good humor to her tales of adventure at the dance, tried not to allow my resentment toward her companions seep in. But no doubt she senses how I feel about them all. Awkwardly emergent female forms, not children anymore, not adults yet, creatures of transition alone, they call my daughter Ally one day and then Lyssa the next, as though she were their property, to name and claim. As though she no longer belongs to me and only I have not figured that out. Deceptively clothed in bell-bottoms and horizontal stripes, outfits reinvented from my own youth, they are the trumpeters of my daughter’s departure, the harbingers of yet another loss. They are the clock ticking forward with no concern for me. All of them. The one with bad skin. The one with enormous thighs. The one who dresses like a whore. The one who smells like dope. I have trouble telling them apart too—as I did the women in Heidi’s kitchen. My tags on them are a mother’s silent protest against their undeniable power over my own little girl, herself half woman now. Half already gone from my home.

It’s not a level playing field. My foes do not play fair. Death and all of its traveling companions and close associates, all of those beings who sneaked into my house, camouflaged in the chaos that surrounded Joe’s swift disease. Loss and grief. Reality itself. And always, with me since, this horrible heightened awareness of impending abandonment.

Booze is a necessary tiny kindness from time to time, I tell myself as I roll over on my side and try to sleep.

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