All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

As with other things, it was the disdain of his parents that kept him dogged, the middle-finger thrill of pleasure from informing them he would be copurchasing a communal house with his Black friends.

With practiced skill I held closed the floodgates of information regarding Tig’s reliably intricate dynamic with Diana and their other lovers. My primary opinion on polyamory was that it seemed like a lot of fun for logistics fetishists.

Back at Rion, we set the table, poured the wine. It was deemed too early yet for dinner. We talked about the old times. Deliberated where the hot tub and sauna should go, about how much it would cost for Thom to frame up a tiny house at the garden’s foot by fall. More than a couple of KJ’s friends were homeless now, shuttling between cars and motels and friends’ couches—it could be offered to one of them. How would we decide who? Tig asked, and this set off a firestorm of debate. I was grateful when Jervai voiced skepticism, said, I don’t think any of y’all are engaging with how complex caring for any one of these people would be.

When my relationship ended, things had turned tense back home. Papa entreating me to consider at least meeting some nice boys, some NRIs they could connect me with. A lavender marriage if nothing else. Madi, my mother had said to him with an awful finality. Madi, it will not happen the way we had hoped. Mollé, she said to me over grainy video, we do not know what to do with all this. But we can tell you this: We do not want you to end up alone, end up by yourself. We would like to see you settled, in some way, before we die. We want you to have somebody who will take care of you, okay? Because we all are brought to our knees at some point in this life. The idea that no one will be there for you when that happens—my heart cannot take that. We want you to have family, to have somebody. This is what I think of, staring at dark soil and egg carton, seeds pale as maggots within.

A prattling coworker said, Oh, you must see Dr. K in Dupont. The kindest, gentlest man, Nepalese and so handsome— It’s true he was kind. He’d rubbed my shoulder gently as I heaved from sheer shock. Twelve cavities. Two large enough that he would try to fill them, but they would need root canals down the line. What’s a root canal? I had asked, blinking. Trying to calculate copay and cost for twelve fillings. He’d said I had gum disease advanced enough that I’d already suffered permanent bone loss. See how loose this one is, he noted, rattling an incisor.

If I’d stayed in Milwaukee, eked together odd uninsured jobs, worked as a barista, stayed scooping at Leon’s, what might have happened over the years? I understood then, really only then, Marina’s choice, the choice that had rankled. To try for things but stay, not move right away. Stay with the job and the money and the health insurance that would keep you from the emptied bank account and ending up at St. Casimir or on the street. Love of most kinds could not feed you, could not house you, could not protect you from permanent bone loss that would eventually cause your very teeth to fall out of your head.

It doesn’t do to dwell in fantasy, even if your only fantasy is that you end up a normal boring person: wedded, safe, loving, loved.

Somewhere within me a juridical instinct did prickle, a voice that attempted to play the defense, noting that this sort of person was a pawn in the larger scheme of things, was not who was ultimately responsible for all that had gone wrong. But Peter, or Stacy, or the vast flickering network of finance and capital that trades on the hardship of ordinary people, these were targets too protected and diffuse for anyone to do much about. In this moment, in a lapse of the principles I’d held for most of my life, I settled for middle management.