Milk Read Online Free Page B

a cereal box. As he talked, his eyes followed a young woman in leather pants around theparty.
You’ve been so freaked out lately. I wish you could be mellower
. She could tell by the way he moved his hand around that he was getting drunk.
The God stuff, you know that’s a bunch of bullshit
.
    A guy that her husband used to know came up and he talked about how happy he was not to be at his mother’s condo in Florida. He wore a porkpie hat and a Kraftwerk T-shirt.
It was so depressing down there with all the old people
. A tall girl joined them, introducing herself as China.
Thank the Lord, I don’t have to go to Memphis. My father is so Republican and my mother is a Zoloft zombie
. Mary’s husband smiled widely. Mary looked around at people gathering on the couches and chairs. Most had dressed up; a girl wore silver eyelashes, and one of the guys had on a tuxedo jacket. The Christmas tree was decorated with matchbooks, and below the tree the ceramic crèche was painted with garish colors. The Wise Men were kitsch of the highest order, situated between a lawn flamingo and a ceramic bust of Elvis.
    The girl in the leather pants came out of the kitchen carrying a drink and her husband began again to follow her with his eyes. Mary felt her ears ringing and, though she didn’t have to, she said she had to pee.
    Inside the bathroom, the porcelain was white as bone and the shower curtain covered with tiny black skulls. Someone had left a half-cup of eggnog on the sink and she remembered that it was the night people wait for the birth of the überbaby. Her own labor was stitched into her mind. The pain made her penetrable—air, light, noise; all these moved through her. Blood, mixed with amniotic fluid and scented like seaweed, had run down her legs as she bore down and felt her pelvis opening, her consciousness as if made from paper, ripping in two. Somebody knocked on the door; she flushed the toilet for effect and ran the faucet.
    When she got back her husband was talking to a girl with a choker, whom he introduced as Sonya. The music was louder now, so Mary had to yell to be heard. Sonya said her mom was in Saint Bart’s with her boyfriend and her father was with his third wife up in Westchester. She rolled her eyes and pointed out that the expression on the Virgin Mary’s face was like a porn star’s. Mary’s husband stared at the band of black leather around Sonya’s neck and her small well-delineated breasts under her tight T-shirt.
    It’s so weird you have a baby
, she kept saying. Mary felther breasts swell with milk.
I mean, I could never handle a baby. A baby. God, that would totally freak me out
.
    The lamp was on in John’s apartment. An orb of light fell over his table, but he wasn’t sitting in his chair and he wasn’t sleeping on his futon either. Cold bit into the tips of her hands, and she took her fingers off the iron fence and sunk them into her pockets. Tinsel was woven into the snow sloped against the brownstone, and there was a wreath, with a red ribbon, on his door.
    “Are you waiting for me?”
    She spun around, and there he was with a swing bag of groceries hanging from his right hand. His head was bare and a puff of steam dispersed before his lips.
    “I can only stay a minute,” she said, waiting for him to unlock his front door. Inside he nodded to the chairs by the table and went into the kitchen. Mary heard the sound of crinkling plastic as he put away the groceries. He’d bought himself a few things for Christmas, a pumpkin pie and a rotisserie chicken. She laid her coat on the bed and sat at the wood table; she read the word “aniseikonia” in his journal and the definition—“when one eye sees an object as bigger than the other.”
    “You look nice,” he said as he carried in the teacups and the bottle of brandy.
    “I was out at a party,” she said. She watched him settle into his chair and lay down a stack of napkins.
    He was wearing a blue sweater with holes at the elbows