Bec Bell-Gurwitz
How did we all get born? Marie asked Dad this when she was young. Dad misunderstood. He thought Marie wanted to know about sex, but Marie didn’t want to know about sex; she wanted to know about existence. Dad tried to explain how those two things, sex and existence, were intertwined like bodies, but Marie wouldn’t have that. She felt the heat rise in her chest. No, you don’t get it! Marie said. Dad said Marie would understand when she was older, as if getting older meant you automatically became smarter. Dad was older and Marie did not always think he was very smart.
In elementary school, Marie had to pee all the time, but when she squatted above the toilet, nothing came out, not even a trickle. It was torture. Marie was the only fifth grader she knew with this problem. Dad took her to the doctor and the doctor taught Marie how to wipe correctly from front to back. Neither of them had known there was a special way to wipe and anyways, Dad didn’t like to be present when it came to bathroom things. The doctor gave Marie tiny brown pills that would ease the pain temporarily but they turned her pee a smelly orange. At first the doctor prescribed her thick syrups flavored with cherry or bubblegum—consumer’s choice, but Marie preferred pills. You couldn’t taste them as easily when they went down.
Marie took a regular course of chalky white antibiotics and though these cleared the initial infection, they made her so itchy in her underwear she wanted to stick whole ice cubes up there. Marie usually gave in, the ice melting in hot dribbles and soaking right through her best pair of tights. Again the doctor lectured them on wiping strategies and recommended they throw away all of Marie’s stockings. Dad obeyed while Marie cried. Then there were the probiotics. These had to be refrigerated along with all the regular food items; a milk carton half cracked open, a bottle of apple juice dripping sweet stickiness, a clear bowl moldy with elderly strawberries, the delicate eggs they split for breakfast each morning, Marie’s chicken nuggets defrosting and soggy. The pills sat right next to everything like they were sustenance. Marie asked Dad why she had to take pills that would invite more bacteria (pro) right after taking pills that got rid of that very thing (anti). All Dad could say was that some kinds of bacteria were good and others were bad, kind of like people. Pro, anti, pro, anti! Marie chanted before she swallowed.
As Marie grew older, the doctors added more pills to her collection. Marie took antidepressants for being too lethargic. This doctor thought it had something to do with not having a mother. Dad agreed. By the end of the sixth grade, Marie took six pills a day. Dad carefully separated them into a rainbow day of the week divider. Each day a different color. If Marie hadn’t already started out as a synesthete, she solidified into one. Days of the week refracted light. Forever after, Monday was red, Tuesday—orange, Wednesday—yellow, Thursday—-green, and so on. Marie took the pills, also colorful, in giant handfuls with not nearly enough water. She liked feeling them clump as they traveled her esophagus. The antidepressants weren’t working very well, Dad said. He seemed to take Marie’s sadness personally. He wanted it gone. This was because Marie needed a mother, he said. Something a pill could not fix, she said.
Marie never had a mother. Dad said the woman who was supposed to be Marie’s mother left when Marie was just a newborn. How long the woman waited to leave after Marie’s birth, a few hours or a few weeks, Dad never mentioned. But Dad was clear: the woman who left was not to be called Marie’s mother. She doesn’t deserve the honor of the title, Dad said and so Marie thought it would be better to say she never had a mother to begin with. When Marie shared this with her classmates, they disagreed. Everyone has a mother, they insisted. Do you even know anything? they asked. Did she even know the big secret, how adult bodies flexed and pulsed against one another? Marie did not. Mari felt sure she was different. That she had come from some strange and inconspicuous place, maybe her father’s armpit, or a mouth opening and closing, opening and closing. What Marie knew for sure was that her own body had betrayed her, so she began to revel in betrayals of her own. During class she would take a clip barrette from her hair, prying it open just to jam her pointer finger inside, closing it with her skin pinched between, the metal biting pleasurably against her nail beds. After many cycles of this opening and closing, opening and closing, Marie decided she needed to stop being figurative and start being literal. She told her classmates she came from a woman’s body. That body left.
Marie still felt unsatisfied with this origin story. Whenever she thought too long and hard about the universe, the idea of it would swallow her up. I am so small, she’d think, sitting at the base of her favorite tree at the park, a giant oak with far-reaching branches. All of time is nothing, Marie thought. This reminded her of lightyears. Marie had learned that lightyears meant the stars in the sky were already dead. She wondered after the clouds. Were they dead too? Sometimes it thrilled her to think about—the big swallow. Was being born the reverse? A big gag? Marie laughed, but then chastised herself, remembering her vow. No one would take her seriously if she believed in silly things like being birthed from inside an armpit. Marie would rely on lightyears, science. She found other origin stories, theories, that explained in scientific detail not just how she came to be, but how everything and everyone had. If not for the explosion, Marie thought, watching her classmates, you and you and you and you wouldn’t exist.
***
Marie had her first real relationship with a touring musician. They’d met in college when she took Music Theory for the required credits. The musician called her cute, told her she had a face like a moon while tracing the contour of her cheek with two fingertips. In return, Marie attended all of his shows. Between sets and off-stage both he would flirt shamelessly with his audience, but Marie didn’t mind being sidelined. She didn’t enjoy being evaluated by peers, and besides, the musician was sweet. He was the only guy willing to use condoms. The cycling of urinary tract infections left her in a state of perpetual burning, making sex feel not like heat, but like fire, and Marie had learned, first through this fire in her body, and later academically, that something called fluid compatibility existed. It meant some people’s fluids were more biologically compatible than others. Sex with the musician made all her symptoms worse, so she asked him to use condoms, blaming her body for the need.
Marie was determined to make it work. At first, she had sex because it fascinated her. There was the possibility of creation. Marie liked watching how the bodies yawned and groaned together, how they dripped with condensation. She liked watching her new boyfriend bite his own hand, how his pleasure burbled up from the tip of him, glittering and slimy, an egg-white fountain. It was something new, even while reminding her of other things—volcanoes and geysers she had not visited but had traced as geologic fact—first in kid magazines with their glossy covers advertising exotic animals, then The National Geographic with its deep yellow borders and investigations into far away places. Nobody she was aware of ever visited these places, nobody except hungry photographers and isolated tribes. Marie liked explosions. She did not enjoy learning about people. Every investigation into their lives felt like an intrusion. The geysers, however, were thrilling—as was learning how the earth had formed back when it was just a mix of gasses blending together, how the water could open and spit lava, which became mountains and islands—solid things born of liquids.
When the musician came it was not like Old Faithful, but smaller and less momentous. Afterwards, the musician cradled himself between Marie’s legs. In stillness Marie could trace her own contours and his together—his lines blending against her stomach, hers splayed to the open air. This was what kept Marie having sex. She liked what existed between before and after. Something got lost in movement and friction. They would stay still like that for a while until the musician lost his hard-on, the latex wrinkling pathetically like one of those Ziploc bags Dad packed with ice to dull sprains, the ones always kept out too long, their sloshing skins draped and leaking over swollen ankles. The best part about dating the musician was that he was gone touring for half the year, so Marie could be at peace studying. Now in graduate school, Marie could not only tell the earth’s origin story but could do so in bright, thermodynamic detail. When the musician returned home from touring, the period of stillness after sex became shorter and shorter. Marie began to feel numbness instead of burning. She tried to keep the musician between time and space. It was futile—his condom deflated slowly until it became so loose that he either had to move or spill.
Even after dating the musician for three years, Marie never brought up the concept of fluid compatibility. He might have been offended. Marie was always okay with taking the blame. She wanted to reduce the attention to her body, reduce the overall volume of pills she took. Without telling anyone, especially not Dad, Marie subtracted a Tuesday-colored pill from her weekly regimen. Eventually she weaned to one daily pill, her antidepressant, which she couldn’t get off of no matter how hard she tried. The antidepressant halved, she cried all day. Cut completely, she stared at her arm so intensely it seemed like a stranger’s.
***
The best part about the Big Bang was remembering a time when heat and light and sound and space were the only bodies of concern. The musician broke up with her. You don’t want to move, the musician kept saying, and I do. Marie didn’t understand, but couldn’t cop to her own ignorance. She took over his part of the lease on their one-bedroom apartment and got a real, adult job. Her face swelled so badly it really did resemble a moon. Marie became obsessed with finding out why. She wracked the Internet and learned that her body was attacking itself. Apparently the cycling UTIs and yeast infections were a sign, one her doctors hadn’t been trained to detect. Marie pleaded with the doctors to see her as a universe, but they could only consider her pain literally. A body attacking itself is both.
***
Marie started dating a co-worker at NASA. She did not think they were liquid compatible, but there were enough other compatibilities Marie believed it might last. Between her co-worker’s thighs, sex tasted like earth. The co-worker liked to bury her head into Marie’s deepest places. Her body, like Marie’s, also was attacking itself. Once dating, they took their pills side by side—mostly pungent herbal supplements cased in thick capsules. They joked about cracking the capsules like eggs, the insides leaking an oregano flavored residue they would sprinkle over pizza. Part of the joke was that they would never eat pizza—sauce and cheese were highly inflammatory, off limits. Sex was often also off-limits.
Marie asked about her co-worker’s phone background picture of what looked like a deep black and orange (Tuesday) swirl, which hurt Marie’s eyes if she stared for too long. The co-worker said it was the first photo ever aggregated of a black hole. It repels looking, the-coworker said. The co-worker had fallen in love with black holes as a child. They stoked her curiosity and she wondered why they sucked everything in. She wondered if they were responsible for stealing other universes. Maybe this was the coworker’s mouth opening and closing, opening and closing. Maybe it was fate.
Dad got sick. Cancer, the doctors determined, and then administered bursts of radiation. But the radiation made Dad nauseous, more nauseous than anyone should’ve ever had to be. He begged the doctors to stop, wanting it all to end. Dad pulled Marie right to his side, the scent of anesthetic permeating. He held Marie’s hand and told her that he was sorry.
I didn’t understand, Dad said. What it’s like to be sick. People examining your body like you’re not the one in it.
Wouldn’t have wished it on you, Marie said, squeezing his hand. But she had wished for understanding, which seemed somehow connected with the material condition of Dad’s illness.
She increased her visits. Most of the time after seeing him, Marie would collapse onto her couch at home, the crown of her head nestled between the co-worker’s breasts, their dog resting his long snout atop Marie’s thighs.
Dad died. The musician became famous. The co-worker left and with her went the dog. They had separated mutually. It was sad, but Marie couldn’t have a baby. The problem wasn’t medical. She just couldn’t. Marie knew from a deep place—an armpit or mouth, a black hole emptiness—that she wouldn’t be good for a child and a child wouldn’t be good for her.
Now Marie fantasized about finding fragrant dirt, fertile for digging and growing. She decided to drive very, very far away and park somewhere she could go deep into the woods, possibly never to be found again. Marie hadn’t planned past this—she had no one to satisfy, no one who would check to see if she was still alive with a pain she couldn’t remedy. Marie packed a gardening shovel into her trunk. Her pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone, seeing a red notification pulsing—someone new had sent a dual friend and message request. Marie scrolled. She tried to keep intrusions minimal and resolved to block the offender, the new friend. But Marie stopped short when her screen opened to a large wall of text.
The new friend had started out by saying she was so, so sorry. The new friend had carried this painful numbness around with her for years, a numbness that started with birth but hadn’t ended with it, a numbness that had grown so large there was only one plausible option to avoid being swallowed by it. It hadn’t worked. Even after leaving, the numbness wasn’t done—it followed wherever she went. The numbness, she said, marked where a baby had been, a place that mediated their two bodies.
They didn’t know what to do with postpartum in those days. Marie’s screen throbbed with potential. Marie stared at it for hours, maybe days or weeks or months. The shovel lay next to her on the couch like a companion. New messages came in. Next to them, an avatar—an older, rounder face. She ran her fingers down the edge of her companion, its metal sweet on her skin.
I see you work at NASA. Impressive. The screen glowed. Insistent in the dark. Marie couldn’t resist. She opened the profile, pulled up the picture, traced the contours of a strange face. A face a bit like Marie’s.
What are you doing, Marie said.
Her companion, the shovel, did not reply.
Marie touched the off button, then stared into the reflective black, finding another face—a face she breathed into. That breathed into her. Marie liked to test the face, see that she still controlled it, that it was still her in there. Marie watched her reflection move inside the black screen. Mouth opening and closing, opening and closing. Jaw clicking with the effort. She hissed. Felt the cold of her hand on her own thigh. Turned the phone on again. Directly to the face. The other one. Using her two forefingers, Marie swiped in and in and in—all the way to each individual pixel, down and down and down, so that the woman—the one who birthed her—became tiny splotches of light and space and sound beyond any shape or color—not Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday—not a moon, not a face, but a deconstruction.
I told you it’s still you in there, said the shovel.
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Bec Bell-Gurwitz is a writer living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck and Nipmuc land with their partner as well as their beloved white wolf/dog, Milou. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Khôra, and others. Bec is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, placed as a finalist for The Southwest Review’s Meyerson Fiction Prize, and has received support from Writing by Writers, Corporeal Writing, and Bread Loaf. Their work is primarily concerned with bodies, care economies, and climate change. Currently, Bec is an MFA candidate and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Learn more at www.becbellgurwitz.com.