The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

No, I never wanted it, I said. It never felt like me. That’s amazing, she said, that you’ve always known yourself so well. She squeezed my ass. I smiled, pleased, and didn’t correct her.

There are no men here, I remember thinking. We could be anything. When she lifted her T-shirt over her head, there were three freckles along the ridge of her collarbone, dark as ink and evenly spaced. Orion’s Belt. We would find our way.

At home we made dinner, put unicorn Band-Aids on each other for fun, waited for Brandon.

What I remember is how proud I was of us, him and me, for pulling it off.

But when I put my mouth on Nora’s mouth, I felt like me, a fully fleshed me. When I went home to June, that’s the mother I brought to her.

Winnicott. A child’s sense of self depends not upon it having a perfect mother but a “good-enough mother.”21

June is fine, but I am not. I’m so far from fine that I’ll lie to Brandon about it that night, tell him I was reading on the sofa and fell asleep, didn’t wake up until the phone rang.

wanted to feel the way I had in the coffee shop, when she told me she’d had a crush on me too and I almost passed out at the sound of it.

A couple of weeks later, having fielded a torrent of gossip, she advised us to tell the entire staff. In a surreal scene, we assembled our employees in the Delancey dining room and, after outlining a new policy on paid leave, I formally announced our open marriage.

I watched Brandon try not to worry as I set off to see Nora. We were terrified. He could admit it before I could, because I was busy falling in love.

I wanted to know more about old love. I wanted to know how people become lodestars to one another. I wanted to feel the slow burn of it.

“We were talkers—about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched,” writes Oliver. “We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. . . . It was a forty-year conversation.”23

Remember, I say, we can write the rules here! It’s complicated, I know, but my love is not a fixed quantity. I have enough to go around. Please believe me.

I wanted to make her feel good, but I would have to be taught.

I wanted to get my whole body around her, like an amoeba.

She was a heat I wanted to be inside, a hot bath.

In the dark I beamed, phosphorescent with her pleasure.

Surely she’d be happier with a person who knew the rules. But I wanted to be her person, and she seemed to want me to be. I wasn’t good, but she could make me good. I should hurry to catch up, to get it right.

I wanted to put my ear to her body like a shell, let her echo tell me who I was.

I said, I just want to be a person in bed with you.

Then there you go, I said. You’re not a baby, Junie. You know who you are. Easier to say it to her than to say it to myself.

When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.”25

Another push and now her shoulders were free, her body sliding from me like a thing from the sea, my nine-pound prize fish.

I barely heard him. Purple and wailing, June was on my chest, and I prodded her upper arm gently, admiring its pudge.

Nine pounds! The weight of two shrink-wrapped chickens at the grocery store.

As far as I knew, I was alone in the wreck of my body.

I would tilt her chin toward my Dagwood sandwich and hope she’d open wide.

and Brandon would lie down at our feet, his head on a pile of baby blankets. What I felt for him those nights was huge, vital, like its own presence, a fourth being in the nursery. I had never loved him more.

I hardly remember June as a newborn. I remember my love for her like it was a room I lived in.

To love my baby was to be haunted. Ghosts filled the room of our love, kept us company.

But I’m already doing so much! he cried. You never notice how much I am doing. I see all of it, I said. And I need more. Just for a while.

We shouldn’t have rushed to open it before the baby came. It had been bad advice. We had three babies: Delancey, Essex, and June.

My body, I reeled, did all this.

Hadn’t this man just been examining my injured vagina? Now we were talking about intercourse, and he was urging me to have it.

My people were breathing loudly.

She’s been thinking about it for a while, she says; this ending shouldn’t surprise him.

Did you not hear me? I ask. I think I might be gay. He jerks his hands to his ears, sputtering.

There’s a tension between how a character sees herself and how others see her. I wrote that in my notes from the fiction workshop the fall after jury duty. I knew that tension. It powered me like a battery. Now I am screaming: You don’t get to tell me who I am.

This is a good thing, I’ve always thought: the rupture of love should be unimaginable.

In therapy, there’d be someone to protect us from each other. Here is how I say it: I cannot stay in our marriage. Not the way it is.

I’m the one I have to live with for the rest of my life, I say. Only me. His face flattens, a mask. I have to do right by me, I say.

She sighs, a small moan, and I am levitating.

I don’t know how to have sex with you, I say. And I feel like you won’t let me learn. Another way of putting it, which I did not say: I am learning who you are, and this isn’t working.

Being with Nora feels like a homecoming, I wrote that summer. But to a place I’ve never lived, and I can’t figure out which room is mine.

Here is the part I did choose: I followed what I wanted. Against social constraints, against my marriage, against my own instinct, against anxiety, against rules, I chose desire.

This time I would do something different. I wouldn’t leave me behind.

Our marriage was like that: the way it was built, we couldn’t inhabit it. It was a structure that didn’t give shelter. This sky falls if we stop holding it up.

That’s not true, he said. I know what is true for me, I said.

It was never about whether he worked nights or whether he remembered to take out the garbage; it was about feeling that he was with me, no matter where he was.

Because you love your work. Your work is you. Maybe you would have given it up for me, but I would never have asked you for it.