by Marjorie Celona, Assistant Professor, UO Creative Writing Program
A 2018 O. Henry Award winner, Marjorie Celona’s short story “Counterblast” first appeared in The Southern Review Permission to reprint this excerpt was given by the author. You can read the story in its entirety in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 (September 2018, Anchor).
In those days, my brain was a vortex, a sinkhole, a maelstrom. I was still nursing round the clock, hadn’t had a period in almost two years, could gather my stomach in my hands and shape it into a loose doughnut, my belly button in the center. Stop the planet, I want to get off! was something I said a lot in those days.
Barry and I had brought too much luggage to Cincinnati, including a giant backpack with all of Lou’s stuff that made Barry look like a snail. He was bumping into other disembarking passengers with it, and so I trailed behind him, baby in my arms, apologizing. Lonnie was waiting in a maroon station wagon outside.
She was a large woman, as tall as Barry, with dark brown hair to her shoulders and frizzy bangs. She wore rimless glasses that magnified her eyes, jean shorts, and a Reds T-shirt. White orthotic sandals. She was fifteen years older than Barry and I. She was a no-nonsense Midwesterner. The kind of woman who doesn’t flinch when a baby cries. The kind of woman who gets things done.
I sort of hated her.
The humidity found its way between my breasts, between my legs. Lou and I panted, pulled away from each other’s sticky skin. Barry loaded the luggage, then the big backpack, and took Lou from my tired arms. I loved this about him, this masculine call to action—I’ll load the things! Sit tight, you woman! I looked at Lonnie. I hugged her. I held her shoulders, then ran my hands down her body until I was holding her by the waist. It wasn’t meant to be sexual. But somehow I got it wrong, and she wiggled away from me. “Whoa there, Edie,” she said to me.
The only thing to say was, “I’m sorry for your loss,” so I said it and then we got in the car. I sat in the back with Lou in my arms and let Lonnie talk at Barry. She told him all the family gossip—so many goddamned cousins, every one of them named Anna—while I stared at the shape of her head, how she and Barry had the same high cheekbones. I could see her hands on the steering wheel and they were Barry’s hands, only smaller. The same weird, curved thumb. Lou had it, too.
While Lonnie drove, I pointed at things out the window to Lou, but she was interested in her feet. She could put her toes in her mouth. I loved her feet in a way I thought wasn’t entirely normal. Did other people love their babies this much? I had searched the index of a parenting book for what to do when you love your baby too much but had come up with nothing. I wanted to write an angry essay ever since I’d had Lou. I wanted to give the essay to people like Lonnie, who believed in letting babies cry themselves to sleep, and thought that babies should sleep in cribs in their own rooms the day they came home from the hospital. But I couldn’t shout at Lonnie now. Her father had just drunk himself to death.
“Oh, so you abandoned your baby?” I’d said when Lonnie told me her babies had slept through the night after doing “cry-it-out” for a week. I don’t even remember why I’d called. I think I’d been having trouble nursing.
“It worked for our family,” she said flatly.
“I’ve heard torture works, too,” I said.
It had been our last exchange.
We wound through the hills of Kentucky, and then the Cincinnati skyline was upon us, looking—it always surprised me—like a miniature London. Lou had fallen asleep. Lonnie took a small detour and took us over the Roebling Bridge, my favorite bridge into the city. It was her Midwestern way of telling me I was forgiven.
The trouble was neither Barry nor I had made any money in almost two years. My pregnancy had decimated me. I’d vomited for nine long months. Other women went back to work when their babies were six weeks old, but I couldn’t fathom it. I knew it was wrong to abandon Lou so young. Stop the planet, I want to get off! It seemed to me that the world was kinder to dogs than it was to babies.
Barry had a gig freelancing for the local alt-weekly but had trouble finishing articles. His desk was littered with yellow legal pads filled with brilliant half-written pieces, deadlines blown. We had seven credit cards between us, about sixty grand worth of debt. I’d had a complicated delivery. Three days in the hospital. The fact that Barry couldn’t look after us brought out the old equality-versus-liberation argument in me. To pay our bills I got a visiting professorship in women’s studies, and I took Lou with me. I nursed her while I talked to my students about Germaine Greer. She slept in the front-pack carrier while I wrote on the blackboard about the construct of gender. She played with little wooden blocks during department meetings. When I was told this was unacceptable, I quit. I was so angry at the world that I could hardly stand it. I wanted grand gestures of rage. I wanted a sword fight. I wanted a beheading. I wanted ugly, ugly violence. Instead, Barry walked Lou around the neighborhood while I taught part-time at the community college. I returned home three days a week, breasts so big they barely fit in the car. I made fifty dollars a week. We were both secretly hoping for some kindness in Barry Sr.’s will.
Lonnie had bought our plane tickets. She put us in her guest room—a cramped affair with a double bed and an old crib set up in the corner, though I knew we’d sleep with the baby wedged between us. I nursed Lou in secret. Lonnie dragged up a high chair from her basement and placed mashed sweet potatoes and shredded chicken and a cup of whole milk on the tray, and I pretended that my baby was fully weaned.
—Marjorie Celona’s first novel, Y, was published in eight countries and won France’s Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Héroïne for Best Foreign Novel. CSWS awarded her a 2018-19 CSWS Faculty Research Grant to work on the revision of her second novel, scheduled for publication in 2019.