Tiny Oily Halos
Mina was telling me about zuo yue zi. There were a lot of rules. No washing your hair. No A/C. No going outside, so no more of our daily power walks. I was fixated on the problem of a greasy scalp. Years ago, for a stretch of time, things dipped so far below the horizon that I couldn’t bring myself to take a shower. I would scratch my head and sniff my fingers and rub them together, creating a yeasty friction. I considered telling Mina all this.
“Barbaric,” I said instead.
Mina’s eyelid twitched. Her mouth was a prune of hurt.
“Well,” she said, looking away. “I’m doing it.”
“I mean, sure,” I backpedaled. “Go for it. A month in pajamas.”
We were on our fifth lap. Soon after starting this assistant job at a biochemical company, I had taken to pacing around the parking lot of the office building during lunch, so I could split the day into manageable halves. There wasn’t a lot to see. Generic Westchester landscaping. Cars bunched together for comfort. A moss-baked pond. But at least I was outside, not trapped in the windowless breakroom that reeked of canned tuna. I walked everyday regardless of inclement weather. It was a habit from before I took this job, a way of keeping sane, getting out of the house for a while.
One afternoon, Mina found me knocking snow off the heels of my shoes in the hallway, seeding puddles everywhere I stepped. She was the newest assistant hire. Nervous-eyed, she went everywhere, even to the restroom, with a notepad and pen, in case someone accosted her with a task. As she approached, I braced myself, expecting her to ask me something mundane and time-consuming, like how to unjam the printer.
But Mina only wanted to know where I went every day. And when I said I liked taking walks, she asked if she could join me. “Sure,” I answered, thinking she probably didn’t mean it. “Why not?”
We started going every day. Even during the frigid months, I found Mina waiting for me, her sensible sneakers double knotted. I appreciated her sincerity, how closely she paid attention to everything I said. She made me laugh and I liked to think she found me just as funny. For two people with a thirty-year age difference, we had a lot to talk about. Part of it was the stale Monday morning pastries, the squabbles over real estate in the shared fridge, all the fodder of a grimly ho-hum office job. The bigger part was how unreserved Mina was. She overshared like exhaling. Maybe her upbringing had something to do with it. She once said how, when she was growing up, her father went six years without speaking a word to her and her mother. He communicated through gestures and grunts, for no other reason than he felt like it. Then he woke up one day and decided to talk again. Her mother pretended like nothing had happened. Mina never got over his years of silence, never forgave him.
“I was just a kid. It was abuse.” She repeated the last part with such honesty, it made my face burn.
To reciprocate, to impress her with my own candor, I overshared too. I said I’d wander into Whole Foods after work and spend hours staring at the fish beached on artfully inclined beds of ice, the fruit displayed like museum pieces. I’d sometimes go over to the bulk dispensers and help myself to fistfuls of granola and cashews, dumping the bounty into my reusable bag. Or that time, at home with pretend-flu, I watched a video on repeat of a garbage truck’s arm malfunctioning, flinging trash everywhere. That was my whole day. That one video. I probably did other things too, but I didn't tell Mina about them. Did some reading, made tea. Tried calling June out in California. Talking to her always made me feel better, but her number had changed and I could never remember the last digit. 5-4-4-6. No answer. I tried 5-4-4-7, then 5-4-4-8. The ringing unraveled in long, lulling loops. But, thinking back, the day wadded itself into a fourteen-second clip of a garbage truck. I was horrified at how easily things slipped away from me.
“I’m going to keep a journal,” I declared to Mina. I was going to write in it each night. For two days I made rambling lists of the things I wanted to tell someone, if given the chance: the neighbor’s newly planted tulips, an elaborate cake recipe (I gave up after buttering the pan), an original joke I had managed to come up with. But the details seemed so paltry, so unworthy of being committed to paper, let alone said aloud. I never made it past the second day. I admitted this to Mina but stopped short of telling her the contents of my lists. She laughed, politely. “Journaling isn’t for everyone.”
I also told her I didn’t have kids. Never wanted them. Mina didn’t respond, but I caught how her eyes widened. Neither of us brought up children again. A few months later, she got pregnant. I debated saying something then. Correcting myself, unbraiding the lie. Or, if that was too hard, telling her, “You’re going to be a wonderful mother.”
Only how could anyone, most of all me, know that for sure?
Sixth lap around the parking lot. Seventh lap. We aimed for ten, even better if we hit fifteen. Lately, every time I suggested we cut it short, Mina insisted that we keep going. She could use all the exercise she could get before the baby. “I’m not supposed to sit up. I’m going to be a professional recliner.” She wasn’t even allowed to raise her arms overhead. Or bend down to put on socks. Or brush her teeth.
Mina stopped and put her hands on her hips, giving me a challenging look. “You really think it’s barbaric?”
“Who cares what I think?” I said. Still trying to make amends, I added, “What does Seth think?”
I met her husband at the office picnic. After Mina introduced us, he said, “Oh, it’s you,” his cheeks going pink with mild surprise. “You’re the one that Mina keeps talking about.” I suspected a total lack of filter between Mina and Seth, that everything I told her, he ingested as well. I also couldn’t stop picturing their bodies pretzeling together. I regretted telling Mina how I could be obsessive when it came to the math of conception. When Mina mentioned her due date, my brain was whirring furiously, trying to zero in on the exact week when it must have happened. Sometime around late February. What had I been doing? I couldn’t remember. I cursed not sticking with the journal.
“He says it’s my decision and he’s supportive either way. It’s coming more from his parents. Mine don’t care at all. My mom didn’t even do it when she had me.” Mina’s parents were coming to stay with them for the first year. Seth had cleaned out the basement, set up a bed in one room and a cot in another, installed a bathroom. Her mother was stockpiling dates and ginger root and bathrobes. She chatted Mina’s ear off every night with ideas about the nursery. The feng shui of where to put the crib, how it shouldn’t face any open windows. Mina made no mention of her father, but I could see him clearly. A hunched, quiet old man. He’d be sure to keep out of everyone’s way, to keep himself from being swallowed up by the baby. Inevitably, he’d escape to the bathroom in the basement and shut the door. There. Silence imposed.
We rounded the final bend, past the pond, downhill. Mina’s breathing was jagged, and more than once she waved for a break and hunched next to the line of cars. Her last day in the office was in two weeks. She said she felt awful taking maternity leave so soon after starting a new job. “People must think I got knocked up so I wouldn’t have to come to work.” Before I could assure her that she shouldn’t care about that, Mina said it was all right, it was half-true, she might not come back. Seth was starting a new job with much better pay, enough to provide some cushion for her to stay at home longer. “We’ll still see each other, though,” she insisted. “You’ll have to come meet the baby. And, once thirty days are up, I could use a walk every now and then.”
“Of course,” I answered, trying to hide the pain rabbiting in my chest. Things were never the same after a baby. Don’t leave me, I wanted to say. Not you too. Who would I have left? Mina met my eye squarely. I braced myself, working up the nerve to confess.
“We’re almost there,” I said instead.
It was drizzling as we headed back.
A while ago, we had an office safety drill. A simulation on what to do if there was a flood or an active shooter or a chemical leak. Mina and I were partnered up. We were supposed to help each other put on gas masks. They were hideous and unwieldy with too many straps, the nozzles stiff with grime. Mina’s fingers fumbled with the buckles. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she kept muttering. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“It’s routine,” I said, rubbing her shoulder. “They do this every year. They scare you on purpose in the hopes you’ll remember even a little bit about what to do if something ever happens. My first time, I almost peed myself.” She gave a shaky laugh. I coached her through the drill, making sure her mask was attached securely before putting on my own, feeling oddly buoyant at the end. I had gotten Mina through the hard part, the part where your body refused to obey. She would, I hoped, know what to do next time.
Now, as we swiped ourselves into the building, Mina was still talking about zuo yue zi. Then she stopped in the middle of a sentence. I could see the memory of my criticism guttering across her face. “Tell me to stop. I won’t be offended, I promise. We can talk about something else.”
“It’s fine.” I did, and didn’t, want to move on. I tried to smile.
“It’s just—” She sucked in a deep breath. “This helps me. Talking about it. I have no idea what to expect.”
“You’ll have to let me know how it all turns out,” I said. What I didn’t say: Use a heating pad for the soreness in your hips. You’ll be senselessly tired. You’ll have this urge to burrow away somewhere, so no one has to look at you. At least that’s how it was for me. Or maybe things will turn out much differently for you. Maybe I should have tried zuo yue zi. Maybe that could have helped.
“I will. I’ll tell you everything. I won’t spare a single gory detail,” she said.
I thought of the gas masks, the panic on Mina’s face at everything becoming too real, the world shrinking to a pinhole of crisis. She wouldn’t be alone, though. She’d have Seth and her mother and even her father. She’d have someone to lead her into the bathroom, to a chair propped next to the sink, and help her lean back. Needles of warm water sluicing from the crown of her head. The chirp of a shampoo bottle being uncapped. The humidity of her own muskiness overtaken by Pantene. Fingers rubbing figure eights, steady and sure, along her scalp.
The thing was, I lied to Mina. About not having kids, not wanting them. There was so much love in that lie. Not only for her, because there was such a thing as knowing too much and I wanted to spare her that. But also for me, spilled across the bathroom floor, who could stare for hours at the tiny oily halos my fingertips made in the dim light. I used to play this game. Five minutes, I’d tell myself, and then I’ll crawl over to the shower and turn it on. Ten minutes and I’ll go see if the baby is still napping. Fifteen minutes and I’ll get dressed, comb my hair, put on my shoes, ready the stroller, take June out for a walk. The game didn’t make a difference—I would still be lying in the same spot, again and again, but in the moment, the possibility of getting up was everything I needed.
Joy Guo (@gojiberryandtea) is a writer and regulatory attorney living in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Idaho Review, Colorado Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. You can find her at www.joyguowrites.com.