Relax My Mouth
I. Oh, Miserable! Oh, Devastation!
— I saw Mama’s legs and I said, I love these country sticks! I will marry Mama!
— Because I came from the provinces.
— I said, We fly to America, baby!
— Even Daddy managed a proposal.
— She wants people to say, Wow! This family is cuckoo! Very interesting!
— But this isn’t accurate; it’s not nice. You’re really crazy.
— Mama made it all up anyway. You made it up, Mama, now she makes it up.
— What does this mean she only reads from the dollar bin? We sent you to the nation’s capital.
— Oh devastation my Mama! How about Daddy works like an asshole!
— This is my privacy, my private life.
— I apologize for being a little cuckoo sometimes. I apologize! Right, Mama?
— You think too much about us; that’s your problem.
— Daddy loves you, tell them. You are my best best best! I love you!
— Why don’t you use your imagination—that could be more interesting.
— She’s just playing. Oh, miserable! Oh, devastation!
— She doesn’t love Daddy. You don’t love me.
— She’s cruel like you.
— Every day I bought you pastries! I made you fat!
— You’re cruel like Daddy.
— Crying baby, I hustle bustle you in the car like an animal. Mama was sleeping!
— You always had too much, that’s why—we raised you like that.
— She’s not like you Mama, screaming all the time loud. She’s quiet quiet looking looking.
— I would never do this to anybody, that’s for sure.
— Don’t get so upset Mama she’s just playing!
— She’s lonely. Look at her. You’re lonely.
— Listen to me, because you are my flesh. You don’t need no soul-maker. You need to turn your recorder on! Go ahead, look ahead, to the future, listening. You are free. You are my free American woman. Trust me, there’s nothing better than being a free American woman.
II. Flap
Helen Sr. wore a pink windbreaker for toilet-scrubbing and cooking soups and yelled stupid women work like me. For studying soap operas about memory-lossed viscountesses, her fur.
Eventually the vicountesses were reacquired by their fiances, melon-tempered and brimming with estates. Life is complicated, she sighed.
Money conserved on heating went to Helen Jr.’s antique dance, a single riding lesson on a pony called Champagne. The girl flapped about with her hips thrust forward like a sheriff, drinking whole milk from the jug. Unsupervised, she tampered with the thermostat and read romance novels on the bathroom floor where there was a vent.
Have you been watching pornography? Helen Sr. asked over the cable bill.
It’s Daddy, Helen Jr. said.
Who is going to pay for all this curiosity, Helen Sr. said.
If she were born in this country Helen Sr. would’ve sown and reaped on Wall Street, she reminded her family members. It was true she had a sportsmanly strut; she’d once played semi-professional handball.
Helen Jr. postured contempt at her mother’s wisdom.
Smart women know what to do with a man, Helen Sr. said. You should be a news anchor.
Helen Sr. sent her daughter for a degree.
Higher education was a rare and expensive Brutalist diorama. When Helen Jr. tired of considering supply chain innovations in the soft drink sector, she slumped under the library’s waxy tables and deejayed her disco bean, homesick. Then her brain made lazy laps, too. Language was interesting now, an expressive medium like hair. She often returned to the available idiom—meat curtains, poontang, vagina, like Virginia, like Virginia Woolf. Good luck with the novels, Vagina.
What are you learning? Helen Sr. asked on the phone.
Helen Jr. named the quadrants of a matrix for classifying commercial potentialities.
Cows are good, shooting stars are good, Helen Jr. said. Dog is bad. Question marks are okay at first but not for too long.
Keep learning, her mother said over the television.
One day Helen Jr. came across a flyer for a talk about the future. She meant to engage with some contemporary horizons.
The man talking was not a geezy windbag with crossed legs. Fat ringlets tumbled over his forehead. His face was a tower of produce. Wow, Helen Jr. thought. Do ya see that, Gin?
The difference between a shooting star and a dog, Helen Jr. learned in her management strategy seminar, was who you know. Build your networks, said the professor. Position yourself as a problem-solver!
The talking man said: We must surrender the hoax of a two-state solution. After he finished, Helen Jr. flapped over to the podium and said, What else?
On her way to the hotel room the next day, she called her mother. I’m drinking coffee with a man who’s been on television, she said.
See? said Helen Sr. What are you wearing?
A brown skirt.
And?
A brown blouse.
I knew you’d end up on the news.
He asked her, Do you always wear glasses? And whether she wanted to sit on the couch next to him. He patted to indicate the spot. It was a stipulative invitation, though she wouldn’t have put that word to it then—it only occurred to her a second ago when she read it in a romance novel.
Helen Jr. said, Aren’t hotels funny? The ugly carpets.
The man smiled magnanimously.
Helen Jr. positioned herself as a problem-solver. She took the kneeling position. After they finished he noted, You didn’t enjoy that. But you have a nice, hairy pussy. Helen Jr. had never thought of herself as a person with a pussy, but the man was a celebrated thinker.
What did you really wear, Helen Jr.?
A brown skirt.
And?
A white blouse.
Any special underthings?
You’re a horrible woman and a bully.
Tell them, Jr., how astonished you were when he pat the couch.
So? Helen Sr. said on the phone again. But Helen Jr. didn’t pick up. She was zipping up and down elevators in her trench coat. This was in the nation’s capital.
Many but not too many years later Helen Jr. met a nice man, melon-tempered, with a city-subsidized apartment. He clucked after her comfort and happiness. They had a small wedding on a pebble beach. Helen Jr. wore long sleeves of lace and was congratulated. Her father wept creative profusions.
Frogs sprang from his eyes and filled his pockets.
He stuck a hammy thumb into his mouth and sucked.
The birds outside the window chirped.
What do you know about it, anyway? You, down there. Who are you? No one to me. I knew what I was doing. I am, after all, a compulsive entertainer and not as unbeautiful as I tell you, either. People say my gait is charming. People say, You’re very photogenic. Richie, Richard, tell them. Tell them how you used to take pictures of me. Tell them when you said to the whole dinner table, Look at my wife.
When I told Richard I was leaving, you know, he took my leg and kissed from my ankle to my meat curtains.
Stages are filled with women these days. I’m not the only one up here shouting up a reckoning, though I have no right to be upset considering the resources at my disposal—advice from my mother. Regardless, I am an empirically-minded individual with a library card. A lumpish, peat-like character, the sad clown is slow to kindle and slow to burn. She indulges a capricious sense of fun via compounding misfortunes, but more often than not, repents, and is forgiven before the play ends.
III. Quell
Once, when I was nineteen, I heard a deep voice and looked up. It was Richard in a big white shirt. Richard’s grace is not diminished by his size. You might pirouette across his shoulders, for example. He was presenting numbers about breakfast foods in developing economies. Absolutely! I wagged my tail. Richard is a thrilling man to agree with.
How Richard tells it is he pursued me relentlessly. We married fast. How I tell it is this here.
In our apartment we made everything just so and cooed. He strapped the Christmas tree to his bicycle and kept his long arm around me. It’s hard now to stand close to the back of a man’s neck—a picnic square to cover in kissing.
At that time I had no good reasons for or against anything. He built me a bookshelf. Come now, you say. A greater fineness would quite do. A most exasperating condition, my eye wanders from detail. I shall try! Good heavens, we are much obliged.
Richard, for example, eats ice cream fast.
For another example, we never argued.
My lusts were quelled for some time by the adoration of schoolchildren. With Purpose, Toward Greatness—I entered my trade through a banner ad. We kindly careerists are known to the algorithms. Richard’s mother was a teacher, too; for Christmas she gave me a package of Post-its.
Teaching pays badly, she told me.
My students directed their moons at me and I lectured them about dreams. Dream huge, I told them. Dream gigantic! This part isn’t a lie. They had faces, arms, legs, cheeks. They sat on my lap and caressed my thighs. They giggled through active shooter drills. We practice, I explained, because people come into schools to hurt children.
Many freedom-forward Jewesses have entered the classroom hungry like me, steel-suited in hand-me-down patriotism. Our forebears ran shoe stores in these neighborhoods once, after all. Not mine.
We needed the boys dull and law-abiding like our husbands. Look at Keyshonte, I commanded. Who here, I asked, can sit as quietly as Keyshonte?
A limit to the services one might reasonably ask of children to provide—eventually I met it. Slowly, then all at once, my life was an insult to my intelligence, our fishbowl ugly in its provincialisms. If you want to hurt my mother call her provincial. Look here, reduce your life to one culprit and make it my mother. I never won any awards for teaching, though I often received thoughtful cards.
Richard was proud of me. Once he visited to demonstrate his career.
Do you ever take pictures of Miss? someone asked.
Relax your mouth, Richard instructed when I let him try.
Relax my mouth!
Relax my mouth!
Relax my mouth!
Relax my mouth!
I am failing again to invent Richard for you. Get your own husband, darling, won’t you? Know the precise heft and texture of his balls. Nod, chew, forget, sob: Look at all I have! Read a romance novel but don’t take it too literally. It’s very pleasant. I guess you could say I was mad at Richard in my limp way. You could say I wasn’t reading the signs too well.
Daddy isn’t only illiterate in English, my mother winks at me sometimes.
Sometimes, now, she sits nearby as I clatter these lies around the screen. She has something she wants to tell me, but I keep my brow perplexed. After a while, she sighs. For a long time I didn’t talk to my mother, and that’s why I could make this little book.
You show me your belly, Richard said to me in bed when we shared one.
Oh oh oh! I replied—we’d begun recycling our cat talk.
Richard is a womb, I tell my mother. Splish-splash in his—amniotic fluids.
She laughs at me. People concede I’m funny after I ask enough times. I didn’t really say that to my mother; she finds this talk cryptic/insulting.
Charity made me lazy; no fruit in utopic labor is what I learned from my teaching career. A girl in my romance novel about to die in a house fire explains to a different old man, Cynicism is pragmatism gone unrewarded.
Indeedy-do. More umph in geopolitical disaster than my slippery domestic squeeze; for some time, I hoped to sophisticate myself into some peace of mind. I read about gulags and began to dress strangely. Time to become fashionable, I decided. Flappety-flap in my big colored pants!
A method called swan-diving. First, insert rough toweling between jaws then pull back over the victim’s shoulders. Then tie heels and throw into desert pit. Then leave there. Spine slowly breaks.
More responsible to land-grab the tragedy of one’s own ancestry.
What a relief to find out you’re nobody but first agony. First, mourn the thrumming significance of being a girl on the sidewalk, walking—your husband took this endlessly-spooling possibility from you. Leave the reliable bastard! Then sit alone in a quiet room and listen terribly to your heart go fast.
Many students did not sit quietly; their mouths were also unrelaxed. Teachers spend whole careers begging for silence.
When Richard came to visit, Shenora next door had one of her fits of inconsolability. Her teacher was a neat woman with several mathematics degrees.
You are not respecting the classroom community, she hissed upon Shenora’s screaming face. I knew I’d find Shenora spread-eagle on the floor and I did.
Hi Shenora, I said.
She nodded.
You’re sad, I said.
She nodded.
I took her big hand in mine.
When I think of Shenora now, I think of us flower-gazing in the desert, two extreme climate horticulturalists. Teachers, I wrote in a poem recently, are nice people/dumb/not too ambitious.
Some of my students could not be invented; their traits were already codified by social workers. They screamed at me in Oppositional Defiance. At church their grandmothers took my hand; we prayed for the Lord to help Darion listen.
You can’t do that here, I told a father with a belt wadded in his fist, trembling. I’d called to report a misbehavior; he arrived fifteen minutes later to drag his son into the bathroom.
No one taught me right from wrong, the father said and began to cry.
His son had done a cartwheel, is why I’d called. Walk silently to your desks, was the instruction.
Time to get into the business of plucky non sequiturs, I decided—hob-nobbing toward big ideas, parties. Horror, the situation escalates and worsens, does it not? A glass of Sancerre, comrade, when you have a chance! Thank you!
I can’t remember anything Richard ever told me at a party or at all, though he often conceded that I am, after all, funny.
What happened later? I asked Richard about my last birthday.
You screamed in my ear, he said.
Why? I said.
I don’t know, he said.
What did I scream? I said.
Nothing, he said. Just, scream.
Sorry, I said.
He forgave me that time. It was easy.
IV: Dance
Sexual psychodrama used to be a sensation I paid for on Friday evenings at a rate of twenty dollars per class. All of us in our cancer marathon t-shirts, shifting foot to foot in the wall mirrors. Our teacher was Nikki Cherry. I do not fuck with this, Nikki Cherry said about our stiff quivering. I wanna be scared tonight, she said—our cue to scream: Brap! Then we turned it out, judgement-free. Before I met Jim in the fields I wrote a story about this.
Richard being so beautiful, something decadent in the decay of our romantic life. The lines of his pelvis stirred nothing but satisfaction at the luxury of indifference. All this bad trouble to pine for him again.
We called our imagined daughter Dirka and my soft stomach my boo-boo.
My boo-boo, I said pattingly after dinner.
Then there was a real wildflower field and I met a man there. His right eye had a bug in it but I was afraid to touch him; he removed it himself. I was exceedingly loyal to Richard until I wasn’t.
His name is James. Jimmy or Jimbo is what I called him on the phone, in the parks and pharmacies of my old life.
Jimbo, I said, I drip for you, I heave! Do you love me? Who are you?
I said these things quietly, with my hand cupped over my mouth. My old life was a neighborly place and Richard was well-loved; he planted tulips where there were only candy wrappers.
Richard couldn’t lend his beauty to my endeavor in the fields; I had to make my own. Then I was a woman on the bathroom floor waging tepid rebellion one nude at a time. It would be no use shaking that woman by the shoulders.
My shoulders are okay, my wrists. I posed on my back and on all fours and in the mirror. Sometimes a cat appeared in the frame. You, you, you!
Jim was forthright about his own obligations if unconvincing. He took for his metaphor the anatomical picture. Valves and ventricles—parts for scrap. A more loving vivisectionist you couldn’t hope to meet. He and his wife have a modern arrangement—certain things are permitted; others, no.
Richard and I have rearranged, too. I don’t have to talk quietly anymore because I have different neighbors. I live on the first floor of a modest pre-war building with a woman who lets me fill her apartment with fruit bowls. I dedicate myself to organizing pears and apples.
My new life, you know, it’s very sweet. My tea is thick with honey, like I used to drink with Baba. I think of myself thinking of her as I extort my plastic bear. Exquisite dislocation, I call this murmuring drone’s-eye view. The radio plays. Prayer is just talking to God, the radio says. You can call Him Phil, you can call Him Howard. Our Father who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name. She used to be in trouble, the woman on the radio. Now she mentors emerging alcoholics.
Me, I laugh. I look at my apples and pears and say: Here we are, ladies.
Another job; plunging my hand into buckets of blue water and emerging with a rag. The blue enters the pulpy edges of my nail beds and stays there until I get fired. You do not respond appropriately to common challenges, I am told.
When I go back to teaching they give me the slumpy slow readers. I am some white lady. To arouse interest I offer violence, illicit substances, psychosis.
Capital punishment! I scream. What do we think!
It will only be harder and harder to catch up! Trust me!
They don’t.
When I was still pure of heart my students loved me. Not anymore!
Don’t call my father, they say. He’s not home.
This is getting so yappy and out of order.
After the wildflower field, America’s heartland. Jimmy lives there for now. This is later. His left eye is the same but his right eye is redder. His neck is the same. In the car I don’t keep my hand on his thigh, the way I did with Richard. We sent each other too much pornography; now, he says, he doesn’t feel too sexy. That and he’s having trouble with his wife.
In the heartland things between us also are redder. My mouth hurts from laughing; I laugh too much, I worry about the shape of my lips, I tuck myself into turtlenecks, a Chekhovian peasant wife ashamed of my joy. We go around places.
How are you, he says.
Good, I say.
Jimmy is a liar like me, a poet. His poetry is better than mine; it’s wonderful, exceedingly. In his lies, men kiss the backs of your knees. This feels—we are told!—like the fluttering of a million moth wings.
Jimmy’s lies are so deliriously tender, anyone’s liable to get confused. It could have been anyone! Anyone else, please. I wanted so much to know what my knees could feel like.
Richard and I had a fire escape in our bedroom. He handed me pillows from inside. I read my romance novels and ate cold, festive plates. If you’ve ever tasted a caper, I decided then, you’ve lived enough joy.
There were trees, birds. I stuck my nose to the wind and sniffed: garbage, ambulances. We lived uptown where my father used to drive a bread truck. His shift began at midnight. You need to find a man, Daddy says, who will break himself for the family.
In America’s heartland, I am some other lady, without a fire escape or a husband to hand her pillows.
I recall her saying, I want you to slide the tip of your cock up and down my pussy lips, slowly. I want you to make me beg. Other silly things she’d overheard, though that didn’t matter at the time. She’d never begged for anything in her life.
Richard, you know, he would have done these things for me and gladly. Guilt regarding his wife prevented Jimmy from making any big overtures toward my knees in America’s heartland.
There is a lesson here to be learnt about tender poets. First they string up your bush with Christmas lights. Then they weep against the headboard and scream, Am I a good guy?
There’s only one good guy in this story and it’s me.
In America’s heartland, I woke up before Jim, nervous and wet. He slept on the couch all squirreled up.
Good morning, I said.
Good morning, he said.
I sat nearer and nearer, the nearest I was allowed. I couldn’t keep my nose out of his neck. I put his hands on my ass and my hands over his hands. Feel, I said. Squeeze. Then it wasn’t allowed anymore.
What can we do instead what can we do instead I had to keep him close.
My Baba used to do this for me, I said. Morning rub.
I worked one calf first, then the other. Then the lumps above the knees, then the shoulders, arms, fingers. I sang the song about birch trees. I thought of myself thinking of my Baba, singing the song. I sent her a thank-you prayer, for loving me so gently and thoroughly.
Jim entered rooms Richard couldn’t, where I keep all these gold-spinning looms. For five minutes he stood behind me in that room and we brushed our teeth in the mirror.
One time my mother was right and it was when she said, Richard can never forgive you.
V: Look
— Look what a smart woman does—
— Mama tells fairy tales.
— Trust me, don’t listen to Mama, she kisses like a fish.
— A man has to be controlled, that’s what.
— Man man man! You’re not like Mama. Fly baby fly!
— What have I had in my life—I’m stupid. Now you’re stupid.
— Scum suckers motherfuckers devils—that’s men men men.
— So sweet and so stupid my good daughter. I love you.
— Mama loves you, she wants you to live in Buckingham Palace.
— Just take care of it, hush hush, that’s what smart women do, it’s history! You had to tell everyone!
— She doesn’t want this gray life, Mama. She wants: Wow! Sex! Life! Go baby!
— I know what she wants, I made her.
— We lived in dirt but I bought you a diamond! Right, Mama? I sweat for you.
— What did I know then, my mother didn’t teach me.
— She knows, Mama. She knows everything.
— How could I have known? Where I came from. I wanted to protect you.
— Mama feels so bad for herself. Sorry, Mama. Sorry Mama!
— What do I have to be sorry for? I’m not sorry. Look at my daughter! Look how good. Look how beautiful.
Jessie Shabin is a writer in New York.
