Our Wives Under the Sea (7)
Back inside, the previously distraught bridesmaid was now dancing, having tied her boyfriend’s suit jacket around her waist to cover the stain. That’s sweet, Leah had said when she saw the boyfriend offering the jacket and I had grinned at her without really knowing why. I’ll do that for you, she had added, next time you have a terrible period and I’m wearing a suit.
On the porch, I took her hand and we stood like that for a while, saying nothing. It occurred to me to joke that when we got married, I wouldn’t want anyone to worry about bleeding through their dresses, that when we got married I’d be offended if everyone didn’t menstruate freely all over the place. I didn’t say this, as we hadn’t yet officially talked about getting married, and anyway, the quiet was as nice as anything else.
* * *
I guess it must be weird, Carmen had said, having to share your space. I think about this a lot in the gaps where my and Leah’s conversation ought to be. At dinner, leaning up against the counter, my tongue swells with it, my throat and palate clenching vainly around the lack. We say nothing to each other—I ask her if she wants to eat, she tells me no, she asks me what I’m drinking, but still, in a very fundamental sense, we say nothing. Even her reassurances about the blood, about the places where her skin has changed color, are starting to fade away. Sometimes, I imagine the things I want to say to her, but increasingly I find myself capable of producing little but a kind of mental white noise. My brain moves like a jump between radio stations, falling off topics without warning, cutting to music, to adverts, to weather. I go about my work, chop onions, overseason my food. Every so often, I imagine I hear the neighbors’ television prompting me to speak, although on these occasions it’s typically just a game show host inviting a contestant to answer a question before the time runs out.
One morning, I read a newspaper article about a Korean woman who ate improperly prepared seafood and subsequently went to the doctor complaining of a growth on the inside of her cheek. The doctor, assuming a cyst or fibrous tu mor, ordered a biopsy, but on opening her up they found nothing to indicate cancer. Instead, embedded inside the growth, they found the bodies of twelve tiny organisms, squirmed with suckers, each a little over a centimeter in length. So it transpired, the squid that this woman had eaten had been prepared without first having its organs removed. The woman, or more specifically her buccal mucosa, had thus become unwitting host to a dozen squid paralarvae—minute creatures that, on removal, the doctor thoughtfully placed in a fluid preservative and gave to the woman to take home.
“Listen to this,” I say, reading aloud from the kitchen table without exactly meaning to. “On first discovering the paralarvae, Dr. Shim was heard to remark that he would be canceling the sushi he had ordered for lunch. That’s funny,” I say. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”
Leah is sitting across the table, staring at some point just north of my head. When I nudge my foot against hers, she blinks, her expression that of someone who’s been pulled from some more practical task. I spread the paper out on the table between us, point out the pictures that accompany the article. In the first, a woman holds up the jam jar into which she has decanted her specimens, the ossified little bodies in their greenish liquid reminding me oddly of the sea monkeys I begged for my eighth birthday and never received. The caption beneath the picture: Ms. Moon presents her offspring. The second photograph shows the doctor who performed the biopsy posing incongruously before a wall of white hydrangeas. I squint at the two photographs, replaying the article like a fairy story and imagining the patient and doctor going on to fall in love and marry, bridesmaids strewing a wet confetti of squid eggs at their wedding.
“Do you think she felt better with those things out of her,” Leah asks and I look at her—tight, piercing thrill of her saying something, like a needle forced through skin. I look at her for a moment, the long neck and back and all of her leaning down over the newspaper, two fingers pinched around the head of the doctor in the photograph, as though attempting to pry it off. I poke my tongue into my mouth and try to imagine such a haunting, of prying open Leah’s mouth and finding something pressed against the backs of her teeth. I want to tell her it should all come out, every piece of it—bad cells extracted from her body. I want to tell her that it has to feel better to be rid of it. In the end, however, I only shrug, still squinting at the photo of the woman with her jar of tiny bodies—the tight bouquets of tentacles and fleshy white mantles, a convention of sheeted ghosts.
“Who knows,” I say. “Think of the inside of someone’s mouth. All that squelching dark. I’d expect they were gladder to be shot of her.”
“What would you have done if you’d found something like that in your mouth?”
She is looking at me seriously now. I think about my own mouth, imagine it filled with things that have no business being there—ghost groans of words that died before my tongue could shape them.
“If I found something like that in my mouth, I’d spit it out.”
* * *
We used to watch movies—it was our thing, our first obvious point of connection. Our first dates revolved around it—watching movies by Cronenberg and Bava alone in cinemas emptied out by summer weather, Leah’s shoulder damp against my own and the scuffle of mice in dark places, behind the screen and along the backs of our chairs. In the evenings after these dates, we would wander together, arguing about Shivers and The Fly, about whether or not a movie even counted as a date if it didn’t come attendant on dinner. The first time Leah stayed over at mine, we watched Jaws and afterward talked so long about how Hooper and Brody were obviously in love that we forgot to have sex and simply fell asleep together, Leah’s ankle hooked over my hip. In the morning, she woke me up by playing the Jaws theme full volume in my ear.