The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

When June joined us the following day, she and I promptly came down with fevers, and the three of us spent the weekend at various degrees of supine, lined up against the headboard of the bed like a display of broken-down dolls. I was exhausted; it was too much. I was angry at myself for taking this on a week after our divorce.

Well, replied Ash, having boobs just didn’t seem like me. Have you ever put on a shirt, or maybe pants, that didn’t feel like “you”? And that you wanted to take off, because you didn’t like how you felt in them? I sat on the sofa and grinned, listened to them chitchat like old friends.

Later in the afternoon, we’d work in the yard, and I’d water Fairy Meadow, June’s name for the still-bare patch of dirt where the sewer guys had dug to access the line.

I hope she’d understand, as I was coming to understand it, that things might feel groundless, but she was safe.

Brandon and I still worked together at Delancey: he was sort of the heart of the place, and I was the head.

Now I was the ghost in the scene, lurking on the sidewalk outside, beneath rooms where my life used to be.

I touched my hand to the hole where my marriage used to be. I peered down the fissure.

either. I teeter sometimes on the edge of disliking him, let myself sway there a while. It passes, because now I can get up and leave.

Aiming to be good-enough might actually give us a shot at being decent.

This is family too: people bound together by history, even if they don’t always like each other a lot. How bleak, and how great.

“What you don’t know,” he writes, “and why you don’t know it, are information too.”61

Principles are sexy when you can use them against someone or something; applied to oneself, the effect is less appetizing. I’m the same pliant substance as everyone else.

To ignore my inconsistencies, my pliancy, my “errors,” would be a mistake, because at their center is me.

I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.

All of us, Ash included, have messed up Ash’s pronouns. June is usually the one to correct us. I’m grateful to Ash for their grace, for allowing us to falter and figure it out.