Rachel Ephraim
After Maryann left, I began having orgasms I couldn’t feel. Like, I’d jerk off to completion, and everything that was supposed to happen happened, only the best and final part was devoid of any pleasure, which made me not care if I lived or died, only I couldn’t stop jacking it day after day with the hope of some brightness returning just as quickly as it disappeared, and yet no amount of tugging or stroking did the trick; I was numb beyond repair, it seemed. It was around this time I got the phone call that my Aunt Lynn had died, leaving me not money, but her reservation to see some art exhibit out in Arizona.
To be clear, I’m not an art guy. Give me a Cubs game or a Pearl Jam concert, and you’ve got my attention, but art’s never been my thing. Once, when I was in high school, right after my parents’ divorce and Dad’s out-of-state move, Aunt Lynn dragged me to The Art Institute in an effort to explain the difference between her and my mother, which, as it turned out, had something to do with Mom not having faith in anything but the material world. Which I get. I too had—still have—a lot of trust in the things I can see, physical and stable objects to have and to hold, things that are simply themselves and nothing more.
But wandering that museum, Aunt Lynn claimed Mom married my father for no reason other than money, and now that he’d found someone else to spoil—a young wife and their “dumb-luck baby”—Mom was left with nothing, not even a whisper of her own spirit to fall back on, which was why she’d been drinking. I never could tell if the lecture was supposed to be a balm by way of understanding, or a sister’s vindication that her choices—to remain alone—had finally prevailed. Beats me still.
And yet, I remember it so clearly: Aunt Lynn standing in front of an installation by a Brazilian post-modernist, strands of hair belonging to different tribal members all tied dead center while also knotted together at their ends. She’d wanted me “to think about it.” How was I feeling? What could it mean? What possibilities had opened inside me now that my fate had crossed this artist’s vision? I stood mute—a teen with a constantly drunk, out-of-work mom—and looked at Aunt Lynn like, Are you fucking kidding me with this shit? Can’t we just go to the park with some sandwiches? And for the rest of the day, I privately obsessed over the fifty bucks she’d spent on tickets and how I could have used that money to surprise Mom with a haircut. I mean, really.
***
Ok, so. The morning was gray, limp, and without birdcalls. Snow covered rooftops, mailboxes, and cars without garages. January in Skokie could feel nearly lifeless, and while I wasn’t looking forward to twenty-four hours on the road, I knew somewhere along the way the world would thaw if I kept my foot on the gas, which gave me enough steam to throw some clothes in a bag and fill up the tank of the Subaru Brat I had plans to restore. At the last minute, I also thought to bring Maryann’s stuffed animal—a raggy dog from her childhood missing significant patches of fur—which she’d gifted as a gesture of her devotion and then left behind.
I had no funds to travel, but I’d heard Maryann was out west, maybe even en-route to the Painted Desert if I charted it right, and while it seemed like a lot of effort without any promise of reward, I’d have done anything to stop feeling like I’d been feeling, meaning I’d show up to Maryann’s even if I found her holed-up with some new jerk. The plan was to make her every promise she’d wanted to hear when we were together. I even thought about meaning it too.
For the last six months of our relationship, Maryann had been on about finding herself in a very real window of time. Meaning babies. Maryann wanted to have a baby. A nice thought perhaps, but with what money? With what energy? With what joy? I felt poor in every department, except for the one where at the end of the night Maryann climbed on top of me and made these noises she couldn’t stop herself from making, and for a short while, I found myself leaving the human world for some other system of order, one in which pleasure was the point of everything. Maryann felt it too, I know she did. “You’re my favorite thing,” she’d say after coming, and when I tell you, in my whole life, I’ve trusted nothing but those four words, it’s not bullshit. For a moment, we were really a pair.
The truth about Maryann was she could find wonder in almost anything. She could see a rock on a beach with the same enthusiasm as another woman admiring diamonds. Anything could be precious to Maryann, even a new freckle on my arm, or the way the morning light hung suspended in the fog of the forest. Through the eyes of Maryann, the world awakened—Look, that frog’s basically God! Look, that tree knew our great grandparents! Being around Maryann was like taking some hit of a drug I never knew I needed.
Until it wasn’t.
Maryann could also be mean, and low, and dip into herself for weeks without warning, which felt like some exacting punishment, but for what crime, I had no idea. What I mean to say is that sometimes Maryann wasn’t Maryann, and it was this person I didn’t trust to diaper and feed a baby. It was this person, who instead of telling me I was her favorite thing, recoiled at my affection.
The reservation Aunt Lynn left in her will was to James Turrell’s Roden Crater, which I later learned took the artist over fifty years to complete. Aunt Lynn had signed up for a viewing in her 30’s, and by the time she died, reservations were booked-out ten years, with no availability to make a later appointment. As it turned out, while everyone in the art world clamored for a peak of Turrell’s masterpiece, I had a golden ticket thanks to Aunt Lynn’s whimsy and patience.
Everyone else, everyone not in the art world, had no idea Roden Crater existed. Like when I told my boss at the auto shop, he said, “A volcanic crater in the desert? Tunnels to contemplate light? If you need a few days off, Joe, that’s fine, just say so!” And then he laughed and smacked my shoulder three times the way he sometimes did when I said something funny. After Maryann left, his was the only touch I received—sporadically, but often enough that inventing ways to make him giddy had turned me into a man at the slot-machine.
***
Somewhere in Kansas, my stomach began to turn. I had three days to get to Roden Crater. Since I’d started the journey, I hadn’t jerked off once, and a low-level buzzing, which swam freely through my body for the first leg of the trip, now concentrated in my gut. For the last sixty miles, I’d been craving a chicken parm on a roll with plenty of sauce—nothing fancy, but also nothing sterile. No more gas-station bagels swaddled in layers of cling-wrap. No more sodas, hot fries, and beef jerky. I needed something homemade and warm, so I pulled off the highway until I found a roadside joint with a sun-bleached sign: Dot’s. Hand-painted flamingos waded in cracked-blue waters. The gutters hung below the roofline in a kind of warped smile.
In the parking lot, I reached out to Maryann’s sister to get Maryann’s address. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she texted, which I believed. Maryann had a complicated relationship with Ellen, and when Maryann went sour, she could talk almost endlessly about her sister’s long-standing mission to make her suffer. The way she speaks to me, like I’m still some kid! Like I’m nothing!
I’d only met Ellen once—a kindergarten teacher with a full, bright smile—and even though Ellen wasn’t as pretty, I’d have traded some of Maryann’s looks for a dose of what seemed to be Ellen’s steady, reliable ease. Even Maryann—when she had those wet, big eyes that couldn’t get enough of the world—admitted Ellen could be heroic in her plainness. Ellen read books. Ellen cooked nice meals. Ellen planted a garden, weeded that garden, and preserved the harvest. Ellen, it seemed, could do many things from start to finish that benefited both mind and body, things I’d never seen Maryann even attempt.
Once inside, it became apparent the restaurant, if it could be called that, offered none of what I’d been craving. But I’d reached the kind of hunger which indulged not desire, but need. I needed food. Along the back wall aluminum shelves housed stale breads and flat sodas—products so grimy handling them kicked up sprays of dust. There were also antique dressers covered in fiesta ware, puzzles, and knick-knacks, each item attached to a price-tag. Who was buying chipped plates from this place, I wondered. Who on earth would pay seven dollars for a taxidermy bird with one foot half-crumbled?
At the corner table, a gray-haired woman in sweats watched television at high-volume. The restaurant wasn’t so much a restaurant as it was this woman’s home. That was clear to me now. She looked up from the screen, her teeth glossy and gray as she smiled. “What can I get for ya, hun? I can make anything you want. You just sit down, tell me what you’d like, and poof!” Then she did this thing with her hands, this quick-flick motion to indicate magic would appear.
I was about to leave without excuse when a pregnant woman—a teenager, really—busted through the door.
“He doesn’t believe me, but I’ve never told a lie in my life. I’m as honest as the sun!”
“Can you make a chicken parm sammy?” I said, and the gray-haired woman did the hand-motion again and scuttled into a back room. The teenager—thick-lipped and moon-faced—asked if I had any gum.
I soon found out the girl’s name was Trixie, an unfortunate name for someone who so obviously put out. When I handed her a piece of gum from my back pocket, she asked for another and then put the two pieces in her mouth until she had a big wad. She moved it from cheek to cheek, eventually spreading the gum across her tongue, and then, with machine-gun rapidity, she popped it through the spaces of her teeth, which were magazine-straight. I had the thought I could still leave, that whatever Dot was making in the back wasn’t going to be worth the babysitting.
“Eli thinks this isn’t his,” Trixie said, holding her belly.
I sat at the empty table next to the television, so Trixie sat too. She’d been wearing a backpack, which she took off and opened to place her homework on the table’s surface. As she completed math equations—problems beyond my comprehension—she continued her rant.
“Like I have time to date other people. I’m not Jessica Sumner, for Christ’s sake. I don’t have time, like Jessica, to screw every guy that looks my way.”
The television was still on, and I could hear Bob Barker’s voice telling an audience to spay and neuter their pets. Dot too was making a ruckus, the sound of pots and pans jostling oddly comforting.
“Besides, I love him. He’s an idiot, fine, and a pervert too, but I love him.”
As Trixie dug out another math sheet from a yellow folder, I spotted a marked test. She’d scored a ninety three.
“Great job,” I said, nodding my chin toward the grade.
If she’d been talking to me like I could be anyone—a friend, an uncle, a laid-back teacher—she now looked at me the way I imagine teen girls looked at their fathers, which is to say, she had a lot of need in her eyes to be loved for the seven points she’d missed.
The look reminded me of Maryann, of this time last spring she came home drunk and smelling of sex but wanted my respect anyway. That was the thing: Maryann wanted everything from me—things I didn’t know one human could give another—and I resented her asking for so much. If I hadn’t loved her, it wouldn’t have mattered, but because of love, her plea for my heart to sit beside her pain felt intolerable.
Before getting on the road, I’d read that Kanye West had taken a big interest in Roden Crater, donating ten million to the project when he was still married to Kim. This was before calling himself Ye, before showing porn to Adidas staff to “jumpstart creativity” and making a Jewish manager kiss a photo of Hitler each day. This was also before his 2020 presidential campaign and promise to invent flying cars.
Turrell’s website stated, “the red and black cinder has been transformed into special engineered spaces where the cycles of geologic and celestial time can be directly experienced.” I didn’t know about any of that—about how one might experience geologic or celestial time—but I knew I’d been pleasureless since Maryann yelled, “If you don’t want me, all of me, then you can’t have any.”
My body hadn’t been making sense for nearly a month. I’d been appetite-less before, tired before, disconnected before, but ejaculating without sensation was like watching a movie that ended with the bad guy eating soup. Like buying a house without a roof. Like winning the lottery, only the pot is a dollar and a hundred people also have the right numbers. Pointless, is what I’m saying. My attempts for pleasure were proving pointless.
I looked at Trixie and said, “You’re pretty smart, huh?”
She smiled at me like a good kid who’d gotten into some trouble, which from what I’d seen, she’d probably navigate with grace.
“If you say so.”
I pictured her then staring into her baby’s eyes while singing a nursery tune. I even imagined Dot helping out—making mashed peas, and mashed carrots, and mashed sweet potato. What a life this child could have, with two attentive adults who understood the limitations of circumstance and tried hard anyway. I envisioned night classes for Trixie, a clean and well-decorated apartment, a tenured job as a high-school math teacher. All the while the baby—soon a talkative kid, now an athletic teen—thrived.
“Baby’s cryin’!” Dot shouted from the back. “And my hands are gloved.”
***
There was a story from Maryann’s childhood I couldn’t shake. It was the story of the stuffed dog in my car. The story went like this: it was given to Maryann by a neighbor who’d called the cops on Maryann’s parents during a particularly loud fight. When the police car pulled into the driveway, Maryann and Ellen ran across the street, and seeing the girls in distress, the neighbor went into her own child’s bedroom and grabbed two toys. As it turned out, the cop had gone to school with Maryann’s father and let him off with a warning.
The piece that stuck with me was the part about the neighbor’s young daughter coming into the room and finding her belongings gifted to Maryann and Ellen. When the daughter cried out in protest, the neighbor slapped her across the face. “These girls have nothing, and you have so much!” Maryann confessed it was true—the stuffed dog was her first—but she loved the dog not because she had nothing and then something, but because the girl got slapped in defense of Maryann. That someone might protect, and dote on, and stand up for Maryann was a novel idea that attached itself to that coal-nosed and inanimate puppy. And then she’d wanted me to have it because sometimes I couldn’t make sense of my own life and it was still the only thing Maryann thought she had to give.
***
Trixie walked into a room behind the cash register, and when she opened the door, a wailing punched the air I could feel in my stomach.
“Oh,” I heard Trixie say. “Shit. Fuck. Shit.”
And then, a little louder, she called out, “Hey, Guy, you know anything about rashes?”
“Rashes?”
“Come here a sec, will ya?”
When I came into the room a smell so acrid and vile strangled any dignity I ever possessed. Someone had covered the windows with the cardboard of old pizza boxes, making the light dim. Still, I could see a baby—a toddler, really—standing in a playpen. But mostly, I heard him. His cries sounded sharp and desperate and unlike the bawling I typically heard, out in the world, from other children his age. The fact of the matter was this: the chord of his need cut through me.
When my eyes adjusted I saw the diaper pail, left open because it was so full it could not be shut, and half-empty bottles in which the milk looked thick and curdled. I could also see a rash spread across the kid’s cheeks, lips, and chin and continuing onto his neck. Trixie picked up the baby and brought him into the doorframe where I stood. In places, the rash had eaten away a layer of skin and a yellow and oozing crust had formed.
Aunt Lynn had been a doctor. When I was younger, Mom used to call her for every ache, scrape, and fever. We saved on visits to the pediatrician, and when I needed eye drops or antibiotics, Aunt Lynn got out her prescription pad. After Dad left, Aunt Lynn, more than ever, urged me not to rely on someone else in order to take care of myself. She insisted I go to med school, or law school, or business school. Whatever I could stomach, that’s what she wanted for me—to be a person who could count on the kind of safety and stability a respectable profession might ensure. The fact that I’d kept the auto-body job I took at fifteen never impressed Aunt Lynn, but I hadn’t, until now, wanted more for myself. Standing in that kid’s doorway though, I desired the kind of answer only a doctor could provide; I wanted to offer up reassurance that things could look worse than they actually were. And I wanted solutions at my fingertips.
“God damn,” I said. “How long has he been like that?”
“A few days?” Trixie said. “Wasn’t so bad this morning.”
“He seen a doctor?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s Eli got to say?”
Trixie looked at me strange. It was a look I’d seen before, and the subtext was this: how much before you buckle?
“Eli’s not the dad here.”
“I see,” I said. “Maybe it’s staph?”
“Staph?”
“Staphylococcus.” I was feeling full of experience and charity. I could take this maturity all the way to Maryann, I figured, until the fumes of resolve in the face of real problems powered our lives. “You’ll probably need to nuke it with some antibiotics.”
“We don’t believe in medicine,” Trixie said. “Spiritually, it’s not allowed.” And then, quietly, “But if you have some, I’d take it.”
What did I have to give? Nothing, it seemed.
Soon it didn’t matter though because Dot emerged from the kitchen holding my sandwich atop a square of wax paper on a plate. Seeing the boy in Trixie’s arms she said, “Coconut oil didn’t help much, huh? Onto the yogurt then.”
Dot handed me the food, bounced back into the kitchen, and returned with a bowl before I’d even had a chance to sit. And then I watched as she smeared the yogurt’s cool cream over the boy’s rash with two fingers. For a moment, he stopped crying long enough to dart his tongue at the mess. Anticipating nausea, I sat.
It didn’t make sense, how I’d kept up my appetite in Dot’s roadside shack. In fact, my hunger was now demanding more attention than I could give over to an old woman, a pregnant teen, and a helpless boy. The sandwich, somehow, looked good. Dot must have put the whole thing in the broiler for a minute or two, slightly toasting the bread and browning the cheese that oozed from both sides. I raised the sandwich to my lips. I opened my mouth wide.
On Turrell’s website, he stated, “My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.” I’d been looking forward to understanding what he meant by that. The website also stated, “Roden Crater links the physical and the ephemeral, the objective with the subjective, in a transformative sensory experience.” I could almost hear Aunt Lynn asking me “to think about it.”
It used to be that when Maryann wasn’t making me feel boosted or special, I accused her of not being herself. I’d say things like, “Who are you right now?” Or, “I don’t even know this person you’ve become.” Sometimes it took weeks for Maryann to soften toward me again, but when I felt her close, I’d take her in my arms and say, “You can’t just leave me like that, Pumpkin.” We even had a joke, which I only made when the world, according to Maryann, remained inspired; in reference to a bout of rottenness, I called her Annmary.
The sandwich tasted incredible but only because it was exactly what I’d been wanting. It was just supermarket-chicken and cheese on a roll with some red sauce from a glass jar, I’m sure. But it was warm in my hands, and it was salty on my tongue, and I could feel it—as you sometimes do—move from throat to stomach. Since Maryann left, eating had become nothing more than getting rid of that familiar aching—an aggressive gnawing that made me angry, and short-tempered, and willing to settle for something—anything!—promising a return to function.
I could have taken down the sandwich in four bites, but I made it last eight. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t eaten anything appealing in days; it was that pleasure was returning, briefly, while some knocked-up teen tried to comfort her crusty, angry toddler; while God spoke to Dot saying, “Sickness is a result of false thought,” or some other rubbish that, when you really thought about, also made good sense.
“A hungry man,” Dot said, pleased. I’d cleared my plate. The kid had stopped crying. The sandwich cost seven dollars, but I gave Dot ten, and when the register closed, the day opened.
To be alone and across the threshold of that random and remarkable place made me feel hopeful, like I might lay claim to, and enjoy, other things soon to come. The sky was cloudless. A wind moved across the parking lot and rose then settled the earth.
When I got back in the car, full to the point of sleepy, there was Maryann’s stuffed dog on the passenger seat. I thought about going back inside and gifting it to the boy. Even though I told myself to stay put because the dog was too old and worn to be considered a kindness, I kept it because, at the end of the day, I’d continue to need its particular comfort. Maryann, each and every day I’d known her, had always been Maryann. In my expectation and disappointment, I hadn’t understood that during our time together.
***
I wouldn’t make it to Roden Crater, and I wouldn’t see Maryann again. I didn’t know how to find her, never did, but I’d spend my life spotting her in the world, dating versions of her, trying to recapture the piece of myself that felt alive and important during our time together. Every beautiful movie star in tears would always be Maryann, and every smiling check-out girl too.
Ten years down the line, over coffee and pie, I’d be list-making my afternoon at a diner—trash bags; gutters; wife’s dry cleaning—when a dark-haired lady in a red lip would catch my attention. I wasn’t eavesdropping, but the woman’s heated voice could not be ignored as she quacked on about Turrell’s magnum opus. She’d just returned from the Painted Desert and told a friend, There are no words; once-in-a-lifetime; I’ve been absolutely changed by the experience.
I thought of Maryann.
#
Rachel Ephraim (she/her) teaches Fiction, Memoir, and Social Justice at Bard Early College. She is also a faculty member at The Center for Writing and Ethics, an initiative of Bard College’s Written Arts Program. She received her M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University and has been a reader in the Fiction Department of The New Yorker and a volunteer screener for Ploughshares. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Prairie Schooner, The Washington Square Review, Litro, and The Apple Valley Review, among others. Fellowships include: Vermont Studio Center, La Muse, Milkwood International, and Gowry Art Institute. She is represented by Ellen Levine and Audrey Crooks at Trident Media Group.