Make Room
- Sep 17, 2021
- 3 min read
by Emily James
When the girls are asleep, the sounds come back. The neighbors clinking corona lights into the recycling bin after a long afternoon, the hum of the air conditioning that keeps shutting on because of a cracked bathroom window, the dog scratching the throw blanket to get it set for her to lay. The girls are asleep, and now there are sounds, and I’m leaning into my husband’s arms on a tufted couch, his index fingers rubbing my back. The tears come at the end of so many weeks, days, months of thought, of letting my anger rumble and boil over into screams as those little girls look back with retreating eyes, I’m sorry mommy, they will say, and I see how I yelled to release and put it all inside their tiny bodies. Out of me, into you.
His shoulder is cool against my cheek. He moves his big hands along the skin of my back, a motion like brushing out a long head of hair. Ritual. His glazed eyes stay focused on the Home Run Derby on the screen, an announcer rambling in a pitchy constant voice before the pop of the ball and the roar of the crowd and the swell of my tears, the way it turns my eyes young again. You just can’t think so much, my husband would say if he had words left for me. The announcer rambles on: his tone stays the same even when the stadium noise raises up. Pop, roar. A stack of coasters sits on the glass table, one torn.
It’s not about you, he would say, if he spoke instead of stroked the chafed skin on the small of my back. It’s about the two girls, the way they are growing, their hands letting go of mine as we start across the lip of a busy street. The way the oldest changes her voice when she speaks to me now, an annoyance to the flow of her life, the arms that used to reach up to me and moan to be carried, needing me just to move. Remember that grunt? It was a beg. Hold me, please. I need you, now. Now. Now, my face, so quick to turn, Don’t speak to me like that, I say, to scare them into softening their voices, and push them away just enough to make them close doors quietly and turn locks so they can take deep, real breaths.
Another dog barks from somewhere in the distance and ours tilts her ears forward, lifts her head. Another crack of the ball, out into right center, more words he doesn’t have to say but I suddenly understand: I’m just not the main character anymore of this life. The girls getting older isn’t something happening to me, it’s happening to them. I was once the same: the person that took over someone else’s life, made them a secondary character. Called for them in the night when I needed a snack, stood between them and a bathroom mirror while they pulled my hair into place with tired hands. Now, I’m trying to be a guest star. My name in the credits, white, flashing as an afterthought.
His body jerks, hand stays still in calm. I think he’s angry about time passing, or lack of gratitude, not the last strike flashing past a bat into the catchers glove. Window shopping, tonight, I see, the announcer says.
Why are you crying? My husband doesn’t say, his thumbs moving back and forth before they still. The air conditioning clicks off, takes a break. One day you’ll have real reason to cry. The dog asleep, unflinching. It’s the words we don’t say, the noises we don’t make. You don’t have to speak, the director says. Just move with the scene. It’s my job now to make room. Make room for the dog, for the sounds, for it all, even the silence from the girls room as they dream on their own.
Emily James is a teacher and writer in NYC. She is the submissions editor at Pidgeonholes and the CNF Editor at Porcupine lit. She’s the winner of the 2020 Baltimore Review CNF contest, a Smokelong Flash 2020 Finalist, and the winner of the 2019 Bechtel Prize. Her work can be found in Guernica, River Teeth, The Atticus Review, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere.
