Fiction

A Guide for Single Mothers Who Never Want to Get Married

Remember the girl on the wall, the heart in your fist.

1) Don’t internalize cultural norms that romanticize long-term monogamy.

Don’t blush when the handsome co-worker wanders down your hallway fisting his third beer. Don’t dissemble when he pauses near your bedroom. Don’t hide behind sheet rock when he inquires about the black and white photo of the topless girl wearing a brass Cleopatra-style choker. 

Note her face: riven by laughter. 

Never apologize for the photo or the female positioned on the wall above the light switch. 

Two months later, when Mr. Handsome brings up the photo–when he asks if said ornament might not be excessive for your two-year-old son– smile and say no. Close your eyes and remember your son nursing. Tell Mr. Handsome that he suckled those breasts for eleven months. Little boys know their mother’s milk by heart.

Attend happy hours where you handle the word heart disdainfully; push it away like a plate of raw oysters. If you get comfortable, remember the stench and the jiggle as it slides down your throat. 

When Nikki laments a failing relationships, draw two deep gulps of whiskey and kindle an invisible fire. Prepare to warn her. When she whimpers. When she says: “My heart just keeps getting fucked.” 

Her cheeks are pale, eyes fetid, lips covering a loss. Offer emotional support as she dyes her hair purple then black. Save the lectures for a year from now or a river cruise. She won’t know how much a heart hurts until she surrenders it to a pet or a child or a god.

Suggest no man is worth it. Make that goofy face you’ve seen on sitcoms. Balance firm words against the fluidity of circumstance. 

Remember the girl on the wall, the heart in your fist. Stay riven by laughter.

2) Take stock of cultural norms and conventions.

At work, observe how a glass ceiling magnifies the sound of rain, amplifies the external precipitate events from minor spring drizzles to thunderstorms. Become a student of the workplace–when it rains–when you feel as though are lying beneath a tin roof, naked. 

Swear by physical evidence. 

Notice what co-workers never say. No one talks about what’s invisible. No one mentions glass ceilings that sound like metal. Don’t take it upon yourself to be the bridge. You’ve given enough of your body.

3) Make a calculus of material rewards.

Neuroscientific studies show that specific praise serves as a more effective motivator than material rewards. Praise tends to be internalized, enabling a person to derive satisfaction from a non-external object.

Taste every color. Silence the guilt. Enjoy the ice cream store of bodies. Drift from flavor to flavor with conscious care. Stay aware. Compare textures, aftertastes. Especially when the Caucasian Lover wraps his arms around your torso, holding you close after sex. Keep comparing.

Don’t be fooled by a story in which his shoulders are strong, sinewy, tree roots bulging through concrete. Even if they are. This is a fable.

A story. A lesson to learn about seduction. How he does it. When he swears you drive him insane, chip at his thoughts, rain through his private moments. This is better than sending roses. The compliment is a thing you needn’t water to keep alive. It lurks in the lineament of your conversations, the way his knee vibrates against the underside of the table, the way his teeth bump against your lips.

Promise each other this will end before summer. How brilliant to make such a promise, to agree that sex causes the forced socio-engineering of human commitment soon harnessed by market forces straight to sad, expensive relationships. You know the problem with love is anniversaries.

Create a profile, an operator’s manual. He admires your duress, your conviction, your independence, the way your back curves like a spoon into his torso, the soft breath of bodies cradled, cradling. He loves the purple silk bedspread, the tower of stacked books that bear a bedside lamp, the candles on the hardwood floor, no intermediary, as if nothing if flammable. He likes that you make no rules apart from an ending. The things he likes bundle together like kindling, tiny twigs, crackling words. You can’t loosen your lips from the threat of fire.

When he says: “I savor you so easily…” 

Bristle. It’s too close; the word savior; the verb to save. The white stallion you’d stab in the leg before he whisked you off in the story.

When his tongue traces a lyric along an earlobe, palms never pausing, steady jazz brush.

Pull back. Tug the reign sharply. Don’t permit the creature you ride to determine direction.

When he says: “I can enjoy every moment because there’s no stress to make sense of this, no impetus to take things further than flesh allows, no focus on a future apart from right now.”

Smile. Prod him with your heel. Faster.

4) Avoid behaviors that establish bad habits.

Maintain a subscription to neuroscientific journals. Pay special attention to studies that conclude prevent people from deriving pleasure from the activity itself. Make a list of friends and family affected by this shard of science. Imagine how it sharpens into shrapnel in a calf muscle, priming the creature to seek gains– a plastic ring, a gumball, a wall plaque, the envy of peers.

On a ledger: the end result is loss of freedom.

In a journal: 29-year-old Simone de Beauvoir wrote, I do not wish to believe: an act of faith is the most despairing act there is and I want my despair at least to keep its lucidity. I do not want to lie to myself.

Avoid his smile as you wait to make copies. Avoid what he anticipates from the word later. Continue to offer him your body, its separate but equal parts, as you look forward to summer’s lengthening days, the idle boats in Chekhov, a slow curdle of heat fusing into humidity, the freedom of old things, familiar flushes.

Pay special attention to studies that suggest material rewards reduce the effectiveness of pleasurable activities while having little effect on unpleasurable activities over the long-term. Tell your toddler that material rewards are a short-term solution with a long-running tendency to alter. Give him candy when he has an ear infection. When he gets tubes in his ears, buy him a bunny.

Send back the flowers. Don’t open the envelope. Return the red lace negligee.

Urge your lover to be logical. The horizon of material gratitude is limited by anticipation, pay-off. You only want roses that outlast a single life. You will sleep with him anyway.

“Have you ever met a man that buys roses for a woman after she stops screwing him?”

Guide him through the appropriate logical syllogism.

A fool doesn’t keep buying her roses after she decides to stop screwing you. 

Evoke the sound quarters tumbling through gumball machines, casino slots, the price of roses adding up to loss.

5) Ask yourself what you want from a relationship.

The Caucasian Lover has large feet, toes that skew outwards, an affable gait, thick hands, big bones, low-bitten nails, dark curls, a chest smothered in the soft black curls you’ve ever imagined. Fairy tales do not prepare you for the feeling of your face sinking into those curls, the aroma of his skin, salt on the tongue, dolor so thick it feels scriptural.

He recites Psalms in bed.

“I wasn’t good at school but I was good at making friends,” he tells you. 

He pretends to be fine with that. His grin refuses to be intimidated by the ways books crowd your shelves, capture your attention, tumble from tables, swallow surface matter, half-open, like you head falling over the side of the bed when he licks you. An open book.

You love books more than people. You excelled in school. You ran out of words to devour.

Of course you know: school grades are rooted in behaviorist assumptions which hold that extrinsic rewards are effective motivators.

Of course he says: “I didn’t take calculus but I love watching you eat ice cream.” 

He loves watching you eat anything and enjoy it. You think his mother must have dieted. Imagine the carb regimens, the calorie counters on the fridge.

6) Maintain your independence in both word and deed.

You spend a weekend in the woods. He scours the soil for pebbles that might feel like boulders beneath a sleeping bag. You are bewildered by his care. Since you are camping and expecting discomfort. Isn’t it part of the thrill?

“I prefer to feel good and be comfortable,” he moves the tent a few feet left.

He prefers to have fun right now. A study shows that when rewards grow distant, he will be distracted. 

“What’s the point of studying if you miss out on the inside joke, the softball try-outs, the kisses between lockers and behind the gym?”

Behaviorist theories don’t load algebra or English literature with value. Poems are classified as means to an end. He doesn’t care about looking smart if he can be popular, class clown, the one most likely to dance naked in a subway, if he can do it tonight, if all we’re learning is how to find the right niche in a market.

You want to tell him about the classroom you escaped, that small town, its rigid socioeconomic demographic. One day you would be the girl that got away. The last thing you want is to be remembered, or held back by what others make of you. All the books, the essays, the protests build a bridge towards somewhere else.

Instead you say the stars burn your eyes. It’s easier to talk about stars than bodies. It’s easier to thank him for sudden personal pronouns attached to constellations–and this sense in which you suddenly own them.

He sears the stars beneath your eyelids. When you wake up inside his tattered tent, the stars stymy your vision. 

You hate him for this. 

You will hate him for the way your body writhes towards night, another road, nothing you planned or wanted. His knock. Three bangs. Your head swarming with stars, his hands lifting your hips, the warm hovel of his saliva.

7) When purchasing gifts, consider meaning and where it might leave you on a line graph.

In India, moonstone is a gift for lovers which enables them to see the future if the stone is placed on the tongue during a full moon. What you say is a series of colors to silence a limpid, cream-white stone.

8) Relish the details.

The lover wears his favorite while plaid button down with the cuffs sheared off. “Wrist room,” he says. As if wrists are elbows needing a room of their own, a separate gendered life.

9- Keep an eye on your narrative arc.

You are promoted, given new programs, juggle spreadsheets while weaning your son from his breast. Early autumn light bathes the plaza in pastel panty colors; the shade of your steps, a mottled pink. You wait for your lover’s text while an old man in a green tweed hat feeds pigeons from a bench. 

You fear the way the pigeon-feeder’s shoulder bones protrude like shelves; he reminds you of a man once approached for directions in Bucharest. The man who said: “Strada Henri Barbossa? It’s that way though it might not be the same. They’ve renamed everything. Crypto-communists. History doesn’t wait; seasons keep switching places.”

To some extent, you will find the same pigeons in every park, D.C. to Bucharest. Similarities. Heavy scent of crushed linden flowers and airborne diesel. Button eyes follow you across the plaza. The same pause in which you pretend that you are not waiting for a man to give directions, you are not lost.

10) Don’t burden the present with baggage from past relationships.

Another lover, the one that taught you the limits of corporeal being, the privilege of a heart’s flutter, the beat, the cessation. His eyes the color of Italian marble when you told him it hurt. When you asked him to stop, the marble turning crimson, swelling like wood after rain, his words: “I swear to you I will kill myself.”

It would be easier to die than to change. If your eyes became marble. Easier to disappear than to be the man that hurt women he loved and liked it.

You will tell the moon it’s over. You will say this under your breath so only the moon might hear. The moon doesn’t get angry. The moon does not promise to destroy herself. The moon keeps mum, knowing love has not finished with you yet.

11) Be wary of behaviors you picked up in childhood.

Your parents said they would never divorce. They pledged and promised. The moon witnessed their vows. After they separated, the moon lit your way back to the house, the broken home filled with divorce bones, pretty from the mailbox, impossible holidays.

12) Imagine yourself in ten years.

To see a future lover in a dream, gather yarrow when the moon is visible and place the flowers under your pillow repeating: “Thou pretty herb plucked from Venus’ tree, come tonight that I might see the face of whom tomorrow’s love might be.”

And if you don’t want to know. If you skip this part entirely…

13) Ask yourself what you want from this relationship.

He plays poker for money. 

“It’s just a compulsion.” The poker, the sex, the drugs, the games, the crude jokes.  

“It doesn’t mean anything. I can’t help it. I can stop anytime.”

Tell him you don’t care. 

14) Ask yourself what you want from the weekend.

The sex has a rambling, subway-like quality, the deep underground tunnels where one looked without speaking. Words loosen from the throat on the escalator ride up when one returns to sunlight, its first sharp pricks against the retina. Though it lends an artificial quality to compare the sex to something reliable, hidden, and mechanical, this is not your intention. It’s easy to compare the metro ride to the suspension inside a womb where that enclosed, breathless feeling defines existence– and isn’t a womb in fact a natural space in which words are not required? No demands are expected in the womb. What one needs is delivered automatically. Until we are ejected into a world where we must use words to ask.

15) Become an expert on primate psycho-sexual behavior.

It is logical to wonder why people have sex. It makes sense to ask what we want while avoiding the knowledge of another human mammal. It is amazing how we strut our plumage by candlelight while denying our hunger for avian mobility.

Admire the professional Nikon camera he uses to get you on film.

Nod when he says all he wants is “to capture the moment.”

Do not negotiate captions. Leave the words to eye behind the lens.

Do not ask why the black and white film develops into a set of glossy 5×8 prints, an envelope of what is past. Don’t ask for answers you won’t trust. Don’t set him up for subtle lies of omission, the jail cells built in the service of art. Distrust expands into worries about the future. 

Mark the first day of summer on your calendar in red ink. Anticipate the end.

15) Keep your options open.

In the photos, your head tilts towards the sunlight rather than away from it. Tiny lines you’ve never seen appear around your eyes. Still, you refuse to wear sunglasses. You want to fuck everything that matters about a woman’s life.

Encourage him to pursue other women. 

Say: “Go, enjoy the sirloin.” 

Say: “Eat thee some steak.”

Don’t make a joke about the side-dish. Don’t make it personal.

16) Laugh. Just laugh.

At the discount, pay-by-the-hour motel, you will laugh about the mirror on the ceiling. The laugh will be a form of clothing, a robe to cover the mutual enchantment of two naked bodies spooling together. The thrill of this mirror image in which you appear as a minor detail of his shoulder, an extension of his bicep, a soft mass of wild hair and swollen lips. The wounded eyes of a bird are two tiny black dots simultaneously fragile. You remember the pigeons and how they chased you with their eyes.

17) Use him to learn more about the world and the socio-cultural context.

Gaby Wood: A child’s desire for a doll to come to life may become, in adulthood, a fear.

Watch pornography together. Watch the women onscreen express a smoothie of glee and horror. An auto motion. 

When he brings up a movie, Blade Runner, how the empathy test enables humans to distinguish themselves from replicants, say didn’t see the movie, barely remember the book.

“Imagine how it feels to feel nothing,” the Atlanta stripper told you.

Despite every rational attempt to humanize their cum-struck faces, you wonder who is the android in this picture– the porn bots or the woman that watches them and feels nothing. 

You will wonder this for the rest of your life.

18) Cut off all contact; make a clean break.

You feed pigeons in the park and share crumbs.

When he says: “Poetic things are expressions about how lonely one might be without the significant other– consider the looming Otherness. I suspect it’s invented, a prop to convince the self that we should persist as a couple.”

When you reply: “Maybe we are children doing cartwheels across a meadow that could be anywhere. This could have meaning– the force of direction– or it could be a way to keep moving, to spur to stay dizzy, a momentum to keep from getting bored.”

When he insists: “Never. Not us.”

When you wonder where this conversation is going.

When he tried to answer but you put your sandal over his sneaker and say: “Stop.”

Say: “It’s not a question.” 

What if you don’t want to know. What if this kiss is enough.