“How are you, Mom?”
She swung her attention to me abruptly. It was clear from the question that she had something to say about how I was, or how she thought I should be. Immediately I felt my face lengthen, my eyebrows lift and a frown form at the sides of my mouth.
“Fine,” I told her. I caught the eye of one of the Armenian daughters—she made a questioning gesture about the check and I nodded. “Let’s go on a walk. You should get some outside time today—you’ll feel better tomorrow.” Sid acquiesced. It was a joke in the family that I thought everything could be solved by exercise and fresh air, but over the years I had gotten Sid to share my view—she ran cross-country in high school after I told her she needed a sport for college and ran the marathon a couple of years ago. I could tell she was doing well when she spoke of running. She was compulsive, she needed replacements. When she wasn’t running she was probably drinking too much, or screwing too many interns, apparently.
I was leaving the tip when her eyes caught the remnants left on my plate.
“You didn’t eat your omelet.”
“I ate half of it.”
“You look thin.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t mean it as a compliment.”
“I’m not hungry.” Panic bumped up against the edge of my voice.
“You need to take care of—”
“Sidney, let’s go. I’m old. My metabolism is so slow. You eat less when you’re old, it’s just a fact. You need less. You want to talk? Let’s GO.”
And once again, the bumpkin at the counter, shirt riding up and pants riding down, his face greasy from his burger, with little white shreds of napkin stuck in the stubble of his mustache, looked over at us. He smirked or smiled, I couldn’t tell which. I gestured for Sid to go ahead of me and she walked out of the diner. He watched her pass, looking ostentatiously at her rear as she exited. A power move, performed to assert himself and to warn me. The look was to let me know that no matter how androgynous she may come across, he could still find a hole to stick his dick in if he so chose. As I mentioned, it was an old boxcar diner, and so the exit was extremely narrow. I spent some time pretending to count change in the plastic check tray, then after Sid had fully exited I took an unused straw from our table and, as I squeezed past the man, took the opportunity to plant it directly in the exposed darkened crevice between his left and right buttocks, so it stuck out from his flesh like an erect tail.
VIII.
Deep purple-blue sat on top of an orange horizon, and the trees turned inky black against the sky as Sid and I walked a loop that began at the base of an apple orchard, climbed up to meet the Appalachian Trail, then circled back around, dipping into a marsh, over an old railway track, and back to the little gravel pull-off where we’d parked. It was threatening to storm, the clouds moved quickly, a cluster of loosed metallic balloons crossed the sky at such a pace it was as though they were being chased.
All I wanted, the entire walk, was to talk to Sid about Vladimir. When she noticed my half-eaten omelet, I admitted all the thoughts that I had heretofore pushed away. I realized I was completely and utterly lovesick. It was love. I had restricted my caloric intake nearly all my life, eating half portions, carving little lines around globs to delineate what must be left behind, even throwing food into the trash; but there was only one other period in my life when I left food on my plate without even thinking about it, which was when I fell in love with David. There was a burning in my body, an extra level of excitement keeping part of me fed and running that required no sustenance. It was longing for the love of Vladimir Vladinski, junior professor and experimental novelist. Longing was energizing my muscles and organs and brain. Longing was replacing my blood with fizzy, expansive liquid. I loved him.
I have always been amazed at the mind’s ability to do several things at once. I remember reading to Sidney when she was a little girl—for hours I would read to her—and often during those times I would be in a completely different thought space and would have no consciousness of any of the words that were coming out of my mouth. As Sid and I walked the trail she told me about trends on social media （I didn’t have accounts, mostly because they made me feel undignified, and I relied on Sid to keep me updated）， television shows that she watched, articles that she read. She gave me a long report on The Deer Hunter and how it was much campier than she remembered. All the while I was thinking about Vladimir. I imagined us in a flat in a European city, it didn’t matter which one, so long as the language outside was not English, the murmur of an incomprehensible tongue surrounding us like a curtain of privacy. It would be my flat, with open shelves and a big slop sink and cut-up fruit lying on a wooden slab on the counter. There would be one small bedroom with windows on two sides, big old windows that either stuck or flew up wildly, and a mattress on a floor with crumpled and cool white linens. We wouldn’t live together, that wouldn’t be what anyone wanted, that wouldn’t be compatible with a life, but he would come to me, some evenings, a few afternoons a week. We would drink wine, or not, we wouldn’t need the wine, we would spend hours in a tangle on the mattress or walking around half-clad with books in our hands. （I had to pause the reverie to consider that lately I was having more and more hip problems, so I would need to probably raise the bed, and inserted an antique iron frame beneath the mattress.） I might feel desperate and half-crazed by where he went when he was away, but I would restrain myself, cherishing the time we did have. I would write stories in reserved and pulled-back tones, like Mavis Gallant, about the life of the expatriate. I might teach, yes, I might teach, maybe a few wealthy students, one-on-one, a class here or there at a university. Not a university life, not that anymore—maybe the equivalent of a community college, something very incognito and undemanding. There would be something sad about our love, mainly when I started to become too old, to become Léa in Colette’s Chéri, and his eyes would pool with tears on the day that I told him he could—he must—go. Of course, I didn’t really picture my own self in all of this. I pictured some amalgam of film stars, with doctored teeth and antiaging programs, and money spent with fun, mean trainers who put their bodies through all sorts of tortures. I didn’t picture my already withered top lip with the bulging scar at the tip from the ingrown hair I had attempted to dig out with a razor blade five years ago. I didn’t picture my upper arm aloft, flesh hanging like a ziplock bag half-filled with pudding. I certainly didn’t picture my own breasts, which had always been more conical than globular, and which now, on a bad day, looked nearly phallic.
We had reached the pinnacle of the hike and were on our way down when Sidney impulsively grabbed and held me close to her. She smelled like grease, metabolizing alcohol, and piney men’s deodorant.
“What are you gonna do, Mom?”
“About what?”
“About your life.”
I was confused. Had she heard me thinking? No, I had been nodding at something she was saying about a man who claimed to espouse personal responsibility but, in fact, espoused fascism.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to leave Dad?”