Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,61

with a certain someone?”

“Jace?” I whispered. “No, I haven’t seen him.”

She looked disappointed.

I was afraid to say a word about Miriam. I had never told her that I liked women. I suspected that she wouldn’t take it well. She would laugh and say I was just going through a phase. She might even say mean things about Miriam. But I wished I could tell her what was happening. I wanted her to know me.

My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.

There was total silence now on my mother’s end, no communication. Still, I carried her inside me: her voice, her feelings, her fears, her ideas of food, bodies, the world, women and men. She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs—my brain, my heart—until what was hers and what was mine were indistinguishable.

I wondered whether there was a deadline for when a person had to finally stop blaming her mother for her own thoughts. I thought I’d hit that age, then hit it again. At nineteen, twenty, I decided: Okay, this is enough. You are a grown-up. Time to take responsibility for your own mind. At twenty-one, I am over it. At twenty-two, I understand why she did what she did. At twenty-three, I forgive. At twenty-four, this imposed silence. But now what?

Declaring myself liberated was one thing. Putting freedom into action was another. Even the idea of freedom made me feel nauseous, spun out, vertiginous, lost in a vast limitlessness, zero walls. I was scared to just float, free but alone. My mathematics, no matter how isolating, had given me companionship. In that restricted life I had rules, a border, a system for certainty—even if the very idea of human certitude, within the boundless mystery of existence, was, itself, false. I wanted walls. I wanted them soft and womblike, but I settled for a frigid vault. My mother had helped me build the vault. But now it was my own.

CHAPTER 53

I wanted to look effortlessly pretty for Miriam. I put on a little black skirt and tank top, blotted makeup, no shoes, as though I were just lounging casually in my apartment after work. I shrouded my lust in softer feelings of romance, giddiness, which made me feel less guilty about wanting her. At its core, though, the feeling was undeniably lust. It was all wet.

I still didn’t know exactly how to be the seducer, the one who moves assertively toward another person or teases them fearlessly to the point of action. In my seduction fantasy of Ana, it had been so easy. She was a ghost, and ghosts were static. It was much scarier to be confident when engaging with the warm, vacillating body of another human being who could reject me at any moment.

I’d worn the skirt and tank on purpose, because I knew that I looked thin in the outfit. I wanted to accentuate this feature, to remind Miriam of what I was and what she was in that old competition between women. I felt more comfortable seducing from this place. If I was going to be vulnerable, express that I wanted her, then I needed to already be some kind of victor. I needed to win elsewhere in order to be vulnerable here.

But when Miriam walked into my apartment and told me that I looked “really good,” I regretted my little competition. I felt admiration for her then, for the courage it took her to say that. I’d wanted to hurt her with my body, with our differences. Now I just wanted to help her feel comfortable.

I offered her some kosher wine, something called Baron Herzog California chardonnay, which the tag at the wine store said was “sure to titillate.” Then we sat side by side on my sofa and she told me about her day at Yo!Good.

“It was slow. I spent most of the time out back smoking cloves,” she said.