A day in April stabbed into the high 80s, sending Brooklynites to their rooftops. The potted plants steamed in the afternoon sun. It must have taken the hosts hours to carry them all up the stairs, plus the coolers clinking with ice and cans, the patio furniture and the lights. I would have praised their efforts if I’d known who they were.
“I identify mineral fragments in ceramics but really it’s about mapping people,” my date said, eager and bright. His childhood had likely been a litany of orders to tone it down.
I shifted on the plastic chair, wishing I’d worn a longer skirt.
“Pottery as anatomy?”
“Pottery as a compass. You find clues in a piece’s microstructures and see how it all fits with the compounded knowledge of an area’s geology and history. You can tell which natural resources our ancestors used or chose not to use. Or which civilization or group traded with who. You can draw these conclusions about how it’s all connected. Suddenly, the map of a country gets illuminated with these tiny crisscrossing tracks of footprints. Trade networks, settlement patterns, the level of mobility an individual or a tribe had.” He folded his lower lip into his mouth. “But—you. Tell me about you.”
His curiosity was genuine and steady, his phone facedown on the low table. Questions. Answers he listened to. He absorbed what I said, took it from me. I felt an urge to take it back somehow, probably because I hadn’t been on a date in a while. Ever, really.
I met my first and only boyfriend in the library at college, and the hours we accumulated together were piecemeal, in dorms and between classes. Maybe that was too shaky a foundation to have expected much from, though we lasted two years past graduation. I thought we were a good fit. Three months of his absence later, I still thought so. Familiar sadness bloomed behind my ribs but was neatly contained by the antidepressant. A poisonous jellyfish in an aquarium. Arsenic in a snow globe. It would probably leak later while I failed to fall asleep, but I could mercifully set it aside for now.
Concern flitted across my date’s face and I realized it was for me. I considered telling him that I grieved incorrectly and that it mattered more than he’d think.
“So, you’re a genetic cartographer,” I said, knees sweat-stuck together.
His lips tugged up. “That’s an unfairly beautiful way of putting it.”
“You got your degree in—what? Ceramics?”
“Well, my Bachelors was in Geology and my Masters was in Geology with a focus on Petrology. But technically, what I do at work is petrography.”
I ran through word associations. Geology, a forgettable class in high school. Petrology, study of gasoline? Petrography, a broken pencil. In third grade, some girls hoarded all their pencils after learning that graphite could become diamond under high pressure and temperature. They exchanged looks and sighed in pity if they saw you with a sharpener. The nuns eventually lectured the whole cohort on vanity.
“Are there kids out there who can only use keyboards?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, kids who’ve never had to use pencils at all? Oh—” My teeth clicked shut. “Stupid of me to mention kids on a first date, right?”
“No worse than the girl who spent an hour telling me about how she’d been a child model for Vogue like it was the prime of her life,” he said.
“Maybe it was.” Any other topic. Any other topic. “What makes petrography different than geology?”
“It’s mostly in the level of detail. It’s like, if there’s a photo of the Grand Canyon, petrographers study the edges of the pixels. That’s the whole thing with landscapes – everyone wants these big Instagram surface shots, like oooh look at the pretty mountain – but the details are just everything.” He pulled up images on his phone. “I mean, a photomicrograph of volcanic sand grain is legit Jackson Pollock. Pure poetry.”
The sun bled to its lush dusk, sweeping away some of the city heat. The potted plants drooped in relief. The strings of lights did their thing. I was enjoying myself, enough that I didn’t immediately recognize the low notes rumbling over my pelvic floor. A wire inside me sang and wobbled, a violin aching louder and louder.
The petrographer didn’t know where the bathroom was, so it was ten minutes of descending stairs and fumbling doorknobs before I was sealed away by myself. An unseen hand fisted my uterus. I bowed over the sink, chipped molars meeting hard in the back of my mouth, eyebrows pinched.
They warned me this period might be more painful than usual. And it was. The long groan of a rusted door forced open after a quarter of a year. I hiked my skirt up, but the cramping gave way to a gush before I could get the underwear off. Plucking at them, I sat on the toilet, the only place women were permitted to be disgusting.
I charted the pain, word by word. Period makes it sound neat, a droplet with defined edges, when in truth it’s a looping road: around in Greek (the same peri as in periscope) plus hodos, meaning way or path. Ouroboric genitalia. Fallopian tubes: an intensely female body part named after a Catholic priest, but they can also be called salpinges, with the feline salpinx as the singular. A salpinx was a trumpet in ancient Greece, made of bronze and bone and a bell. Appropriate, I thought, considering the disruption these tubes blared into the body. My womb strained its neighbors until my intestines creaked, the same way my hips strung up my knees. There was no such thing as an isolated injury. Or an isolated incident. Or an isolated person. Which isn’t to say I didn’t try.
When my date texted to ask if I was okay, I retracted, clenched, increased my internal gravity until my muscles congealed hard onto my bones. As though the closer to stone I could become, the safer I’d be. I did this a lot. It led to tendonitis in college. From wrist to elbow, a plucked guitar string, white hot, the tendon flushed and quivering, soothed by Bombay from the freezer wrapped in a towel. At night, my jaw wound itself tight, until my molars splintered and cracked. Dense knots hung from my shoulder blades. The strangled sinew of my hip flexors meant sex doubled as a stretching exercise. And it’s not one thing, a hip flexor isn’t. It’s a clumpy braid of muscle groups named like meteor showers: the iliopsoas, the quadriceps, the gluteals. My favorite on the poster in the doctor’s office — the general physician, not the gyno (like I’d be able to remember the decor at the fucking gyno’s) — was the iliacus muscle because it sounded like Icarus.
My boyfriend had been with me when the general physician gave me new words to chew over. Bilateral chondromalacia patellae. I thought it was from the running, but it was all that breathless tension morphing my hips and thighs into concrete, the weight dragging the kneecaps up and allowing the cartilage to be scraped away. My ability to run had been tragically stolen from me. Though the physician’s murmur of irreversible left a welt, there was poetry in injury. Catholicism dismissed with a diagnosis. It was now detrimental for me to kneel. Standing up for myself was now the default. Bad girls bend at the waist. I shook the snow globe that bupropion had formed around my emotions and considered the handheld storm, all the things I could be feeling. Devastated? Angry? Betrayed? Even if I had shucked the antidepressant, I doubted I’d have been histrionic about my knees. My boyfriend mourned on my behalf, a nice little piece of foreshadowing that blew right by us.
My body wasn’t a loved one to grieve with or an enemy to conquer. It was a colleague at most. Assigned to collaborate on this life together. Scars and calluses as progress reports. That was forgivable. When they were still around, my friends cooed at how lucky I was the antidepressant allowed me to accept my body as it was and then in the same paragraph, praised how I’d dropped dress sizes due to its appetite suppressing properties. Bupropion also skimmed clarity from my sight – as though the trick to battling depression was to smudge the world, blur the threat, can’t be sad if it’s all fuzzed at the edges, can’t be sharp and useable, can’t cut skin.
Even out of focus, my underwear was vivid and gory on the clean tiled floor. A candle sent a stream of thin smoke to the bathroom ceiling, the scent of pine meeting the tang of blood. A memory regretfully stroked its fingers over the nape of my neck before plunging into my skull. Other blood on other tiles. A fetus that aborted itself before I could make up my mind whether or not to. Miscarriage. Could there be a more ladylike word? The unmarried ‘miss’ paired with the empty stroller. Something tragic and prim and Victorian and never spoken of.
I didn’t tell my parents. However, my friends, my boyfriend and the nurse at the gynecologist’s had been frantically upset that I wasn’t frantically upset. As with my knees, there were no hysterics hiding beneath my calm. Bellowing at my body seemed as senseless as screaming at a tree for dropping its apples. Nature happened and it happened carelessly. Owls ate baby rabbits. Herds trampled the weakest among them. Fertility was a risk from all angles. It attacked the body and interrupted dates and tripped you up when you tried to move forward. I liked the petrographer. I wondered how long he’d like me.
“Did you know the term hysteria is from the Latin word for womb?” I remember asking the nurse.
“I know how you must feel,” she insisted. “I lost my first, too, and it just broke my heart. You must be in shock. It’s so, so hard. This might stick with you for a long time. But let me show you something.” A light scratch of her fingernail down her arm summoned a puffy line. “It’s dermatographia. Every mark sticks with me for an hour or so. Everything sticks with everyone, of course, it’s just visible on me. It will fade though. Really. There, honey, there, it’s okay.”
I was crying because she’d wanted a baby and it died. Others’ disappointment never failed to smash the snow globe to pieces. I dug through the goo and glitter, searching for my own grief – I really searched – but my loss was like a stranger’s obituary in a newspaper.
My boyfriend urged me to forsake the bupropion, though it had had nothing to do with the miscarriage. He insisted it was for my mental and spiritual health, that I needed to feel this. As though it was necessary for me to at least carry the grief to term. He didn’t even really want children, I don’t think. He simply needed me to feel things the way he did, but it was impossible for the dull instruments of my emotions to meet the pitch of his. He had anxiety whetted by OCD. Funny, all those scars you couldn’t see, the hidden Icaruses, the host of chipped bones and vanished support, the muscles and thought processes so taut they stung. I fought him for a while, because I knew my giving up the antidepressant wouldn’t give him what he wanted, but he wore me down. Love does that.
Off the bupropion, I cried a lot, for all reasons except the right one. The otters at the zoo were so beautiful, I watched them for an entire wet-cheeked hour. Fury over climate change and its deniers exploded out of me in screaming sobs. The nurse’s loss kept me weeping past midnight, as I imagined wanting a child and so nearly having it and it being torn from you at the last moment. But I wasn’t upset about my own miscarriage. And I didn’t know how to apologize for being okay.
When I was a teenager, a spirit medium told me I wasn’t meant to have children in this life. Her office was in a different time zone, so I’d sat on the front steps of my parents’ house in a sweater at 6am, phone pressed to my ear, surprised at how many stars there were. That darkest darkness before dawn was radiant. I wasn’t sure I believed the medium. Even after I learned I was pregnant and then learned I was no longer pregnant, I couldn’t made up my mind whether or not she was the real deal. But I could believe her. I could believe I wasn’t meant to have children. And that willingness said more than any stamped and verified prophesy.
I was too clenched, too distracted, and most damning, I was too amenable to the decisions my body made without consulting me. Women were not supposed to forgive fatty hips or stretch marks, let alone a fumbled birth. This relationship, til death do you part, was meant to be decades of cramps and complaints and denied compliments. But a female body was intrinsic worth as well, something of a trust fund, all that societal value clasped and cradled inside us. Just the potential of pregnancy was enough. A woman’s fucked-up wasteland of a life could be redeemed in nine months. A man’s was a tougher fix. It was hard not to feel bad for them, how each had to construct their worth, a narrative of wealth and victory, how each had to individually convince you they were vital. Witness my boyfriend accusing me of being careless with his legacy. Witness the petrographer insisting the worth of a pebble outweighed the canyon it came from.
At least the petrographer poured his identity into vessels other than women. I finally responded to his text, said that I had my period and needed a pad. I expected he’d freak out. The pottery he dealt with was bloodless.
Minutes melted by. I began wadding toilet paper. Then he tapped at the door. His gestures were gentle as he placed a small box of pads into the hand I stretched through the crack. There was blood on my fingernails. He could probably smell it. He probably felt grief the way other people did. He probably wouldn’t like me off antidepressants. Fuck, he probably didn’t like me right now.
“I have twin older sisters,” he said. “This isn’t new for me.”
“I might not be able to date you. Or anyone.”
I closed the door, but his voice came through it, reminding me of enforced visits to the confessional in church. I’d always lied, about both the sins and the guilt.
“Because of one period?” He laughed.
“Like it could ever be singular.” I squeezed the cardboard box out of shape. “I’m just…bad at dating, connecting, I guess. You know how they say you move past a bad thing that happened to you? Like it’s a road sign you blow by? What do you do when the road’s totally clear and you know you’re meant to be looking at the scenery but you don’t?”
“I don’t understand,” he said, cautious. “You mean like how I prefer zooming in on the dirt instead of looking up at the mountain?”
“Yes. Something everyone else feels but you don’t.”
I waited, soaked underwear dangling from my fingers, shocked by how much I wanted him to answer.
“Well, I mean…” He stammered. “I guess it’s about figuring out how zoomed in you want to be?”
“Is it? Perspective doesn’t change what’s there. My ex said I had a heart of stone, the way I could just lose things and not care.”
“And what do you think?”
Instead of answering, I wetted the wad of toilet paper and followed the red trail from the inside of my knee to my crotch. Noises from the rooftop party drifted through the heat-fogged window.
I assumed the petrographer had left, but his voice came through the door again.
“Heart of stone is one of those phrases that’s always bugged me,” he said. “Because stone looks cold and unmoving, but in some ways, it’s always moving. Well, I mean, the earth’s crust is. People like to pretend it’s solid and stable and that things like earthquakes are these isolated incidents, but the tectonic plates are in constant motion. We just don’t notice.”
He labored at his abecedarian euphemism, the nonsense irritating. It was an authentic attempt at comfort, at least. His version of scratching a line up his arm.
Wordlessness settled over me, warmth washing into muscle fatigue. I pictured the tiny crisscrossing tracks of footprints inlaid in my genes, all my ancestors’ trade networks and the settlement patterns that would end with me. I imagined the rocks pushing up into their weary feet, the slow observation of stone witnessing humanity’s breathless race of reproduction. How it all led to a petrographer fumbling to continue our date through a door. How the pebbles gave him a kind of patience I hadn’t seen before.
The next steps were out of focus but it was enough that they were there, that this tense evening would relax into a tomorrow. In a stranger’s sap-scented bathroom, I washed my vagina with all the tolerant love of a mother wiping clean a child.
Laura O’Gorman Schwartz is a queer writer of fiction and non-fiction who grew up in Ireland, Japan, Singapore and (anticlimactically) New Jersey. She fled to Bard College in upper New York to major in Japanese and now resides in Singapore with her non-binary spouse and their boyfriend, as well as two cats and too many cactuses. Her short stories have appeared in several publications, including ‘The Birmingham Arts Journal’, ‘Ruminate Magazine’ and Ohio State’s ‘The Journal.’
