Need a quick refresher of the last chapter? Read chapter 18, The theory of shark children here.
Deb goes to Smith College that autumn to study Greek and philosophy. She spends long, lonely hours studying long-dead philosophers and a language that feels unfamiliar on her tongue. Each Friday evening, she packs up and takes a two-hour train ride back home.
“You should join a sorority,” Violet suggests when Deb tells her how lonely she is. The twins begin to cry, and she takes them into her arms and shifts the hem of her nightgown. The twins latch hungrily and she winces, then sighs as the three of them settle in. The wet sounds they make while nursing turn Deb’s stomach, and she tries not to look at her sister’s swollen, vein-riddled breasts. Everything about pregnancy, about motherhood, seems damp, bloated, like a tick ready to pop, draining the life out of the thing it’s attached to.
Deb makes a face. “Greek life’s not for me. Too many parties. And boys.”
“How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it?”
Because sorority sisters are not real sisters. They’re not Violet, they don’t memorize hundreds of digits of pi when they’re bored, or translate Italian or French or Latin texts for fun, or conduct anatomical studies of flowers or earthworms or a squirrel, once, after it fell dead from a pine tree.
Then again, Violet doesn’t do any of these things, either, not anymore.
Always, she has a child hanging off of or hooked up to her. When Deb visits, Violet is usually cooking something, testing the heat of a bowl of pasta before doling it out to the toddlers, squashing blueberries so they’re no longer choking hazards, pouring cup after cup of milk. Violet has always been serious about her studies, and her education in the correct way of doing motherhood is no exception. She tells Deb little facts about what she’s learned: “Most children don’t begin to smile until they’re eight weeks or older.” Or, “Babies are born with 300 bones. And newborns don’t have kneecaps!” One day, she pulls out an anatomy and physiology textbook. Curious, Deb leans forward to look at the page Violet flips to. Horrifyingly, there’s a picture of a child’s skull with teeth stacked on top of another row of teeth, as if the child had been half shark, half human. “It’s fascinating, but a little sad,” Violet says, a fingertip gingerly tracing the tiny skull.
She’s always been fond of her intelligence, but in the fall of her sophomore year, Deb takes her first psychology class and falls in love with her brain all over again. Not only does it keep her alive through the incredibly complex tasks of breathing, digesting, and pumping blood throughout her body, constantly, all day, every day, and not only has it allowed her to observe, learn, read, speak, and do all the other intelligent little acts that bring her so much joy, but it is what makes up her essence. It’s the thing that makes Deb, Deb. Intelligent, sarcastic, a little aloof. Learning about her mind—“Your conscience, your personhood, your soul,” her professor had once waxed poetic—allows Deb to take a closer self-examination, like splaying and pinning herself to a dissecting tray, poking around to see what stuff she is made of.
She switches her major to psychology and starts to keep a dream journal in which she attempts to untangle the threads of her unconscious mind. She dreams of fields of flowers withering and blooming across the expanse of a decade. She floats in a pool of livid green water, little silver fish surrounding her in great clouds, their bodies quick and flickering as breath. She is a dove taking flight, and the people of the world are tiny, chaotic specks. She pities them from the depths of the sky.
Do I boast grand illusions of myself? She writes in her dream journal.
She sleeps with Dr. Abrams, her psychology professor. The physical reminder of her body is good in the same way that a reflex hammer tells you that your knee is there and fully functional. It’s never fully satisfying—Peter doesn’t use his arms as much as Deb would like so it feels as if she is being smothered—but it scratches the itch, so to speak. Her curiosity of what it is to use one’s body in that way is sated.
Plus, there’s after, when they stay up late, discussing behaviorism and Skinner’s cats and rats and the latest research on action potential. They mourn the atrocities of the Third Reich and the way it uses psychology as one of its weapons, as a means for annihilation. He is open and unbound with Deb in a way that he could never be when they are in the classroom together.
That night, she dreams of stars. She plucks their light one by one, as if they are ripe, juicy apples. She bites into one, its light staining her teeth, her smile fluorescent, ancient, and dangerous. The star is so tender and so sweet that she wakes with tears in her eyes.
Why is the world intent on its own destruction?
What part do I play in all of it?
Am I in love?
Though she sees Peter a few evenings a week, for the most part, Deb is still alone. She’s stopped visiting home as much, opting instead to spend hours in the psychology research laboratory where Peter has asked her to be his assistant. She has learned to become a solitary animal, like an eagle or a panther. It gives her power and strength, not to have to rely on anyone else, to have the freedom to pivot quickly.
She visits her sister that spring when she has her sixth child: William.
Charlotte clamors for Deb’s lap, and she pulls the girl into a hug, burying her nose deep into the child’s sweet, biscuity head. “You’re getting so big!” Deb exclaims.
Charlotte nods. “I am five,” she says seriously. “And you didn’t come to my birthday party.”
“Charlotte,” Violet says tiredly.
“I’m sorry I missed it, little moth. Would you still accept a birthday present from me?”
Suddenly, Charlotte is bouncing and animated again. “What did you bring me?” she demands.
“Go look on the table in the sunroom. But be very careful. It’s fragile—do you know what fragile means?”
“It’s easily broken,” Charlotte says as if the question is childishly easy. She hops down from Deb’s lap and takes off for the back of the house.
“Whatever you brought, I hope you know it will be broken by the end of the day,” Violet says.
“A monarch chrysalis,” Deb says. “On a branch of milkweed. Charlotte’s old enough to be careful.”
“She’s not. She busted one of the twin’s lips just the other day.” Violet sighs, leaning her head back against the couch.
Deb frowns. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine,” Violet says. When Deb is silent too long, Violet looks up. “I’m fine, really, Deb. I don’t need you fussing at me, too.”
“Who’s fussing at you?”
“Oh, just. You know. Mother. The doctor.”
“The doctor? What’s your doctor say?”
Violet moans which awakens William who begins to squall. “Jesus, Deborah, I can’t do this right now. Can you please go check on the other children?” Tears limn Violet’s eyes, and Deb knows that Violet is really asking her for a moment of privacy so she can cry or shore herself up or whatever other little trick she stores in her back pockets for the days that she feels her sanity slipping through her fingers like sand.
“Of course,” Deb says. She wants to reach a hand out, squeeze Violet’s shoulder. But it embarrasses her, imagining the way Violet would shrink away from her touch, the way she shrinks from her children after a full day of being groped, pushed, cuddled, held, slapped, tapped, and squeezed. Deb nods goodbye instead.
It’s not the children she seeks, though. She goes straight to her mother who is lounging on the back porch, sunning herself while watching John, Charlotte, and Sunny play a stumbling game of tag.
“I can’t be it again,” John wails. “I’m too slow!”
“That’s the whole point,” Charlotte shouts, running dangerously close to John’s outstretched hand then scooting away, untagged and laughing maniacally.
“Mother,” Deb says.
“Hmm?” Her mother watches the children, eyes cheerfully crinkled against the sun.
“Violet says her doctor is worried. Why?”
“Violet didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not sure it’s for me to say.”
“Mother,” Deb says. Her face is foggy with worry. “Please.”
For a moment, her mother considers the children, hands shielding her face from the sun, foot tick-tick-ticking an incessant rhythm against the metal leg of her chair.
“Did you know,” she finally says, “that when I was pregnant with you, I couldn’t keep any food down for two whole trimesters? The only thing I could eat were green grapes which are hard to find in the middle of winter. Your father spent a pretty penny having whole flats of grapes shipped to us from California.” Deb’s mother chuckles then she stills. “Can you imagine living your life, let alone growing one inside of you, subsisting only on green grapes? Pregnancy is very hard on a woman’s body.”
“Yes, Mother. Of course.”
Her mother nods, then her face breaks into a grin, but it looks painful, as if the skin around her mouth is stretched too tight, ready to burst. Deb realizes, in shock, that she is about to cry. She kneels and says gently, “Is that it? Violet’s last pregnancy was hard on her?”
“All of Violet’s pregnancies have been hard on her.”
“Five pregnancies in almost as many years would be hard on anybody,” Deb says.
“Eight,” her mother sniffs.
“Eight?”
“Eight pregnancies. Your sister has been pregnant eight times.”
“Eight?” Deb says again, incredulous. She does the math quickly in her head. That’s four children and a set of twins, plus three miscarriages. Eight pregnancies in six years. “Is that even possible? That’s too much in such a short amount of time.”
The way her mother stays silent tells Deb that she agrees with her.
“Why would she do that to herself?” Deb can’t help it—a wick of anger flares in her. Her sister is smarter than this—eight pregnancies in six years! How could she be so irresponsible? How could she be so stupid!
She doesn’t realize she has said these thoughts aloud until her mother looks at Deb and says, “You seem to think that a woman always has control over her decision to become pregnant.”
Deb’s mind is a sand pit. Her mother’s words sit atop the surface of her brain, refusing to sink in. When they do, she gasps. “What are you saying? Is it—it’s him?”
Her mother doesn’t say anything but the way her eyebrows knit, the way her foot wobbles like a spring at the end of her foot, Deb knows she is wild with worry.
“Is he hurting her? I mean, beyond the health stuff, is he—you know. Hurting her?”
Her mother shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Not that I can tell in my conversations with Violet.”
“Then why is he doing it? He’s not giving her body enough time to rest!”
“Men have needs, Deborah. They will go the lengths to get those needs satisfied.”
“So he’s willing to slowly kill his wife for his needs?” The wick of flame burns into something brighter, angrier. “Can’t they just use contraception?”
“Deborah!” she hisses. “The children.” She has edged dangerously close to impropriety and shrinks back into herself. “That’s none of our business.”
“Your daughter’s health is none of your business?”
“Of course it is!”
“Then why aren’t you doing anything about it?”
Her mother sits forward suddenly and smacks the table. The metal reverberates sharply in the air, startling the children and Deb into momentary silence. “What would you have me do, Deborah? Tell me. What should I do? Butt into their private lives? Anger my daughter’s husband until she is forced to shut me out, the only help she has? Or stay silent and watch while she continues to have the life drained out of her? Those are my two options. The only two options. Tell me, would you choose differently?”
“No, Mother,” Deb says, taken aback. “I’m sorry.”
“You are smart, Deborah. Probably the smartest person I know. But I’m not as stupid as you think I am,” she says. “Nor is Violet.”
The children resume their shrieking until John ends up in a sobbing heap in the middle of the yard. Her mother tuts and stands to go to him. “Children! I think it may be time for a snack.” They whoop and holler and sprint for the kitchen where their grandmother slices oranges into wedges and teaches them how to pop them into their mouths to make mock, oversized grins.
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