Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"Remember the winter I quote unqote dragged you to the ..."

Helen Keller Really Lived 137 Remember the winter I quote unqote dragged you to the Caymans, how on our return a security hound smelled someone else’s coke on our cash? Sweet doggerina, you were always good at sniffing out secrets—just not so great at pinpointing what they were. So yeah, I knew you knew, even as I was sure you had no clue. An awkward internal rhyme, but STET. One of the things I’ve noticed since the great divide, by the way, is how much more aware I’ve become of words—their sounds and rhythms, their textures, their bodies, so to speak. It’s as if my own lack of substance makes me more sensitive to substance —I now find it everywhere, even in the most abstract 138 Elisabeth Sheffield and rarefied language. One of the benefits, I guess, of being less dense. But to return to my point, however pointless, I knew you were on to me, suspected me of some kind of betrayal. I could feel your eyes sliding over my person when I rose from our bed and padded off to the bathroom, your intelligence softly probing, seeking the information leak my lips would not provide. Why couldn’t I just come straight out with it and tell you? Early on, during one of those cozy nights of kitchen talk, you said you were not interested in having kids. I repeat, not interested in having kids. You wanted to write children’s stories or take photographs or do both like the woman you once said was the author of your favorite book as a little girl, The Lonely Doll (a glossy portfolio of nursery perversions unavailable to me during my pure Soviet youth and hence, at the time, unfamiliar . Otherwise Mr. Bear might have given Edith a spanking right then and there.). “I need to make something that is me but also more than me” you claimed. Then you went on to cite old albert-e, no doubt as quoted in the fools gold stamped pleather edition of Everyman’s Eggheads you inherited from Ma Van Staal: some Nobel blah blah about how the artist and the scientist, each makes this self-created cosmos in order to find peace and security that can’t be found in “the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.” I was skeptical about the peace and security (already I sensed you couldn’t get no satisfaction), but I was all behind the Big Bang, baby—the more of Selina Van Staal, the better. Bababoom. You said you were not interested in having kids and then suddenly one day there you were, talking about time running out or making hay or seizing the day or maybe even just that your biological clock was ticking though I remember you Helen Keller Really Lived 139 saying once during a kitchen session that you hated that tick tock talk. Anyway, I don’t recall because I wasn’t listening—it was months before I could even believe my ears. But it turned out you were serious (I still remember the night—the rubicon of your turned back). Well, never let it be said I didn’t do the least I could do, as the drunken doc says in that old American military sitcom (which was on TV the night of our short lived cold war). So then we tried, or you tried and I just fucking enjoyed myself fucking. My fortieth birthday present to myself (vasa deferentia all tied in a bow) remaining a secret between me and my urologist. ...