Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

by Katie Yee

The punch lines are more like weak kicks in areas you don’t expect, that don’t even hurt. The jokes make no sense. Rather, they make a little too much sense. The

I would write about a peculiar store that sells sleep by the inch, happiness by the pound, wisdom in spools, and love in degrees; I would write about Harold the Elephant, whose job it is to sit in uncomfortable silence among humans whenever something isn’t being said, whose job it was to be the literal elephant in the room. Then Harold would go home to

his elephant family, from whom he was keeping a secret of his own, and there would be a human in the room.

it seems like an awful lot of effort to create new life and to get to know them, too.

But the years since have turned him back into a carnivore, someone who devours the flesh of weaker animals.

A man and a woman walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a very old joke, and it is. It is also the start of an affair.

Even in that blink of a moment, I somehow knew. Conjured up this person who looked like she fit a little better next to Sam.

Celebration urns: sometimes the end is a good thing.

Being with my husband was like that. Like being a kid, being able to fall asleep on the ride home.

I’m surprised by how quickly it returns. Like a song you didn’t know you still knew all the words to, the way you always instinctively remember your childhood address, your first phone number. Almost like muscle memory, pulling your credit card from your wallet without having to rifle through the slots, or your maiden name always at the tip of your tongue. Ingrained. The things cut into you at an early age, the ones closest to the core of who you are.

Questions about the state of the world and where you can truthfully see yourself in it. After the vague notion of being okay with kids on a philosophical level—the acknowledgment that you are not, say, repulsed or morally opposed on the grounds of the environment, overpopulation, or on behalf of orphans—there is the reckoning with your lot in life. Your financial reality. Your body’s limitations.

I have in my mind that finding these things out might rob them of their intimacy in some small way. I want to know everything about her, so she feels less like a secret and more like something I am let in on. Less like another door that has been closed to me.

but these days, I’m wanting to give them more of myself for safekeeping. I

“Can rats swim?” my youngest wants to know. “I can’t swim yet,” she says, wide-eyed with concern. I ruffle her bangs. I tell her, “Oh, don’t worry. The clever rat jumps on the back of the strong ox, and the ox carries him across to safety.

“The ox.” Second place.

The language of these big life moments isn’t quite right: the way we talk about people who have “lost” their lives. The battle against a cruel disease: a war in which there are no real winners.

If you die of cancer, does it make you a loser? It implies a lack of strength, or otherwise a kind of carelessness I cannot reckon with. It robs you of your agency in a way that reminds me of “losing” your virginity.

In this way, we learned to pack our love into the logistics.

To me, that was an act of love, something that not only said how deeply I cared for his health and time but also implied that I would be back soon to enjoy a nice tall glass of cold, filtered water.

It’s incredible to me that in all these legends, it’s the cunning and the witty that win every single time. Brain over brawn. I find deep comfort in this. Sometimes I feel like I live more in my mind than in my body. Sometimes I worry that this makes me a less available parent.

It’s not an outright lie; it’s the truth with shadows.

Mother. Divorcée. Scorpio.

My fear has only grown. Fear for other people is the absolute worst because there are not one but two variable factors in the situation: the thing you’re afraid of and the beloved you feel fear for. It is the ultimate loss of control.

Worrying feels passive. Worry lives in the mind. It’s a mental exercise of things

that could go wrong. But fear comes alive in the body. Having kids puts me back in my body this way.

want to be seen as an easier patient.

We settle on Maggie, after my husband’s new lover. Like, you’re a cancer, Maggie. But also like, look, I have one, too.

Terrible words come in threes.

Maggie—the tear and the tether.

It feels less like theft and more like a public service, really.

The fact that the body has tissue, built in—the body was born ready to absorb sadness.

Shakespeare said a rose by any other word

would smell as sweet. Would we echo it with reverence if a man named Bob had written it instead? For some, names are just flaccid balloon skins, waiting to be filled with the air of meaning. But the rest of us know the weight of them.

“To read?” my kids ask. “A privilege and a power that not everyone has,”

“It’s not cheating. I just changed the rules,” he says.

Are you ever nostalgic for the way the light touches a place? The way the sun holds on to a room? Could you mourn the loss of that arresting sight—the way the light fingerpaints the wall with colors of its own, playful and daring and unselfconscious? The sunset throwing colors like a child before lights-out. One final burst of what’s inside.

At first, he suggested taking them every weekend, but I protested. I didn’t just want to be the homework checker and the lunch-box packer! I didn’t want the bulk of my time with them to be relegated to the tyranny of school days. I wanted whole days with them! I wanted waking up early with Cap’n Crunch and Scooby-Doo. I wanted to see how the sun sat on top of their hair, their faces, at all hours of the day. I wanted to take them to the zoo!

He tells me that his grandparents only tell them “nice” stories before bed. Swaddled stories. The kind with happily-ever-afters that end in a neat little bow like a noose around the imagination.

For Noah, an owl: a vessel of wisdom. For Lily, a peacock: the ability to stand out and shine in a room. Maybe this year is for the birds, but maybe they can turn it around.

Here’s how you know if a childhood memory is real or merely fabricated from so many retellings: Look around your memory. If everything feels big, then it is real.

find myself wanting to write to Maggie instead. To tell her about my life—to prove to her that it wasn’t deserving of being tampered with in this way. To tell someone the quirks about Sam—hard-won knowledge. Things that might save her sometime.

Maybe every lover becomes an archivist of their beloved.

think if enough bad things pile up, they inevitably cross over into comedy. I am a collector of bad things with the hope that I can make them funny. Midas and the Comical Touch. A woman gets left for another woman—it’s tragic! She gets cancer on top of it—what else is there to do but throw your arms up in surrender, throw your head back and laugh? The hits just keep on coming.

What do you do with all the little details of a person you’ve collected over the years? Each little nugget like a treasure, a candy slipped into the pocket of your memory and saved for later. The little specks of shine (foil I mistook for gold) that I could pull out of my hat about any old lover! “Oh, I used to date a guy who…” A fun party trick.

They say dogs grow to fit the cage they’re in. People too.

They say that near-death experiences change you. They make you more appreciative of what you have. Maybe weaker, maybe stronger.

The way they swarm to form a bridge between the earth and the heavens so that two lovers may meet for one night only.

Did we fall in love with the same parts?

There’s something beautiful about the tree-planting-season

planting-season debate to me. Spring gets all the credit as the season of rebirth, but we might be kinder in giving a tree a chance to establish its support network in the quieter months. Autumn: a time for hidden growth and the subterranean layers of a person.