Terese Svoboda
alice breaks down the door
Actually? No. I let her in. She is all crispness: white and navy, the way the French have with color-framing elegance. Her French, albeit a Corsican French, the pursed lips before various vowels she's forced to flatten out in greeting, air kiss to air kiss, is equally seductive. She puckers for the man I'm living with three times. A magic number? The man I live with has also been hers, and he's told me her specialty is witchcraft. I am in my twenties, this is New York City, naturally witches practice here 24/7. At the very least, the extravagance of kisses means that they lived together not so long ago, and it is his invitation to her for dinner that has broken down the door. Not that she regrets my taking him on, oh no, she makes that clear with her arched eyebrows at the bare living-room-cum-sleeping arrangements that suggest she knows exactly what I'm in for. It's just my fear of their history assaulting our tentative togetherness, our new our that's too evident.
But what am I in for? Alice's so-trim tininess, her sexy way of waving away her cigarette smoke, doesn't say. Corsican means crooked, she explains with her petit smile. In Corsica, women known as mazzeru go into trances and fight each other, the man that I live with tells me, with unsettling pride. She is at least ten years older than I am, with a child of her own, not his but one that he asks after. Not that the child has found any support from him, no, he is just another man she has lived with, sans conception. Her son is in high school already, she has a career, surely she doesn't need men in general, not the man that I live with in particular. But, I consider, maybe it's more a matter of greed, and a kind of pregnant paranoia invades me. I suspect he wants me to find her of interest, at least a prize of prior conquest. Do all men fantasize their previous liaisons filling the room with adoration, which then spews eau de attraction toward each other? There's surely the concomitant fear of females bonding against them, not fucking.
Out the window, a sparrow moves ratlike through the low bushes: jerk, jerk.
I am very pregnant and thus attractionless: ungainly in belly, full in the face, pigtailed because the looseness of my hair itches in this heat. Alice offers to wash the dishes stained by wholesome beets and meat better made into sandwiches, and I dry. We talk about a wife previous to us both, secretary to a famous artist who played chess with the man that I live with. Of course he won, she says, laughing, the smoke djinning out her mouth, enveloping the three of us, him stacking every plate close, opening his now empty hand in the air acknowledging his chess acumen.
She offers a present from inside the deep pocketed folds of her navy jacket, the one she threw across her shoulders in a French way when she came through the door. A baby gift. She announces it can't be opened, it's bad luck for the unborn.
I too am now inside her world of rules, of magic. She is the reason he will not sleep in moonlight, has moved the bed into a cramped corner and drawn the drapes closed. She is also the reason I can never get sex right, although I am forgiven for now, by virtue of my clever ability to bear. He's told me more than once, in the midst of or after lovemaking, that Alice could spend hours, once an entire day—despite the deep wrinkles around her eyes or perhaps because of them—keeping him from climax. I'd lumber on with him, coupling away, sometimes twice to show off what magic I had, but now his magic with me appears to have been solely for procreation. No longer is there seduction or even the pretense of play-coupling. I have done my job, and is Alice here to give him her okay?
Her rules: the gift cannot be opened.
Magic, I decide, is OCD of the mind, do this and do that, with chance swirling around it. I don't want to open the present. Maybe she didn't want to bear his child and she got me to do it, through some of this magic, and whatever's inside the present will bind me to it.
I am afraid of her present.
Her hair, so carefully cut close to her head—gamin—is starting to fluff out, wing-like, with every drink, with every shake of her head, and her accent increases, making her harder to understand. What is she saying? She doesn't know this new friend he is namedropping, but he also makes movies? He needs a model—he glances at me—but with having the baby she won't have the time.
It's not time that's the problem, I say, shielding my wide front with a wine glass of water—and a weak laugh.
The man I live with stands beside his ex-lover, his glass full of French wine. I'll drink to that.
It is a confusing toast.
There is coffee, there is chocolate. At last she slides her still-crisp white blouse into her jacket and says aloud that she hopes that all will go well.
She has had a child. I want her to tell me what to expect, expecting. An oracle. Isn't procreation a big part of magic? Or is it only sex? The questions freeze on my lips, she is so sophisticated with her Tell me. Instead of providing information, they both laugh at my question. Then there's their back-and-forth farewell when she arches her little body toward his. But don't all exes do this? It's no big deal, I decide: air kisses ear-to-ear. I bend forward for my application so my front won't touch hers and thus be affected by whatever of her magic might brush off, worrying that a loose hair from my head will attach to her blouse for her later manipulation.
She's at the door when I call out: Wait! And I rip open the present.
A boy's vest. With no in vitro yet, the soon-to-be sex is still mystery, why does she pretend to know? A 50 percent chance, I say, but the man I'm living with is so pleased, as if whatever's inside me were confirmed, that his annoyance at my breaking her edict is brushed away: She's impatient, he says in the tone of apology.
Yet the woman is still friendly, and I need a friend. No other friend of mine has had a child, I say in response to her rote offer to meet again. I'd love to picnic at the park with a basket full of cheese, if she'd bring the long stick of the bread of her country. Just the two of us.
* * *
There we are under a blazing sun, with a tablecloth spread over the U.N.'s grass, and my leftover-seeming bits of cheese divided on French bread, plastic cups holding wine and water like another miracle. I am two weeks overdue, I am wild with my occupied body, frantic to shed it. She talks about her job translating statistics for the world, how dreadfully boring it is, wielding a cigarette the way you would a wand. She gives me a French smile with her eyelids squeezed together that is both friendly and something else, and I worry. My nipples buzz because they are full of milk, right? Or is that something else a seductress can cause with her magic?
I am hoping the conversation will turn to warnings about the man that I live with. My question number one: why did she leave him? A baby sleeps with its mother, he's announced, it must nestle between us. His ideas of intimacy are either too close—the baby so near his sex—or distant, myself asleep in another room with the baby in a box beside his bed.
Alice says worry isn't good for a baby.
I angle up from the ground, my mother-in-waiting gear billowing so cheerfully the tablecloth's what I might have been wearing. We speak about how little American women acknowledge the vagaries of fashion, oui oui, and by simple extension, myself, and a clenching begins inside me, probably indigestion. I have, after all, eaten, whereas she hasn't. Too midday, she'd said, with another flourish of her hand across a calorie-lite cup of wine. So what about it? How about some tips? I gesture toward my belly, which is clenching.
You're not my daughter, she says. She tosses the stub end of our bread at a bird that has come too close, then the bird hops to her hand, but not mine.
You're not that old, I say, a cut I can inflict as a compliment.
She laughs with what might be appreciation. Or have I just been turned out, refused entry into the citadel of magic?
Au revoir, I say badly, with an accent that sounds as if I'm underwater. I tuck the bottle under my arm, and aim my swollen feet away from the bread-eating bird, not wanting to make him fly—bad luck.
A little boy, she says coming up behind me.
Homunculus, I say in faux disdain at her interfering predictions, unable to imagine myself containing a male and certainly not wanting to acknowledge her prophecy.
She's trailing the tablecloth, folding it, and talks at my side about something—the clenching is distracting—and I reply something, then I say yes when she suggests a cab, and yes, it is okay for her to pay for it when we reach the apartment, and finally, yes, please come in with me.
On arrival, she calls the man that I live with. He has convinced me to birth at home, but the midwife is too busy when Alice calls her, so Alice stays and makes tea and holds me up and encourages me to walk in circles. What can she be conjuring? The man that I live with shows up in time to take his turn holding me up when he isn't on the phone trying to get the midwife. Eighteen hours of calling and an exchange between Alice and the father that I'm not in any shape to analyze leaves me, eventually, in Alice's hands, while he goes out for food.
Alice takes the vest from its drawer.
I can't seem to modulate my screams. The downstairs neighbor pounds mightily with her broom on the ceiling, and I bite a hole in my pillow. The baby makes its way out just then, despite or because of my screaming. There he is, the boy Alice has predicted, how annoying, who looks just like me, who looks at me and screams in reflected terror.
She lays the boy on my stomach, all bloody and sweaty below her still-crisp white chic blouse, and douses a scissors in boiling water to cut him away from me. I feel very little, as if a nail had been pared, no—I feel turned inside out. Hello, baby. When the placenta appears, she takes that too, and with salt and pepper, with flour breading, fries it in olive oil.
He is back by then, and he admires the baby that he says so clearly resembles himself, then he and Alice sit down to the table to eat me.
Terese Svoboda is the author of poetry, novels, a memoir, a biography, and a book of Nuer translations. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bobst Prize in Fiction, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, among others. Her latest books are Dog on Fire (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), Roxy and Coco (West Virginia University Press, 2024), and The Long Swim (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024).
photo by Beowulf Sheehan