Deirdre Danklin
Seeking shelter from political podcasts, I started listening to the blues. I got kind of obsessed with watching a long-fingered musician play his guitar. My husband asked me what I was smiling at, and I showed him my screen.
“Some handsome guy playing the guitar,” I said.
“That guy?” my husband asked.
I shrugged, but it annoyed my husband that I’d called the musician handsome. Soon, he had invented a story wherein I went to the zoo with my toddler one day, and the musician was there, playing a set by the penguin habitat. Then, I ran away with the musician–poof.
“I’d come back in like six months,” I said.
“Hmph,” my husband said.
What a gift, I thought, to be married to someone who still thought that all it would take was a glimpse of me pushing my stroller: dry shampoo, soft pants, unwaxed, and a famous musician would lay his guitar and body at my feet.
***
During my emergency C-section, I was naked, in active labor, on a metal table, breathing through contractions while a student doctor guided a needle into my spine.
“Don’t move, honey.” Nurse Kenya (whose face and name I will always remember) held a gown in front of my heaving, swollen body, for my comfort, I guess, even though I felt like an animal and an animal doesn’t know it’s naked.
Once my son was pulled from me, my husband walked over to him to cut the cord and tell him he was loved, and then he made the mistake of turning around and seeing the other side of the screen the doctors had erected. There I was, inside-out.
“How intimate,” my poet friend said when I told her this story. “He’s seen your intestines.”
***
This semester, my college students asked me who my celebrity crush was. I told them about the long-fingered musician. They looked him up, then pulled a face.
“That guy?”
I asked them who their celebrity crush was, and they pulled up pictures of clean-looking boys who couldn’t play instruments and sang about love. Little girls, I thought, who don’t understand the sex appeal of the blues.
“Let’s see your husband,” they said.
I pulled up a picture of him holding our son. He looked exhausted, but we both look exhausted in every picture we’ve taken since our kid was born.
“Oh, he’s way handsomer,” my students said.
That made me smile because my students jump at any opportunity to call me old or tired, so they must have seen something in my husband holding our boy, smiling for me, that put the blues to shame.
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Deirdre Danklin is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a Clay Reynolds novella prizewinner. Find more at: deirdredanklin.com