Читать книгу Please Read This Leaflet Carefully - Karen Havelin - Страница 7

PART 1 ……………………

NOW MY HEART IS FULL

………………………… 2016

For years, I’ve considered it an established fact that the female body is a pain in the ass. Despite all its unique talents, from youth it’s constantly wracked by hurricanes, snow and rain—by cramps and pains, premenstrual craziness, menstrual craziness, postmenstrual craziness, pill-related craziness; waves of uncontrollable rage and sadness, fluctuating weight and libido, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, not to mention the smorgasbord of mindboggling changes that is pregnancy. There are so many things that swell, ache, cramp and droop. So many places an eponymous cancer can settle—breasts, uterus, ovaries—and so many illnesses that are specifically female. The male body seems like a sunny campsite in comparison.

My feet are in the cold, metal stirrups.

“Has it been a whole year? That must be a good sign, huh?”

“Yeah, I’ve been doing okay.”

My gynecologist signals me towards her with an efficient little wave of her fingers and I scoot further down on the table. Beneath me, the paper cover crunches against the padded vinyl seat. My doctor is an intelligent woman with a slight accent, who never appears to be in a hurry. She is in her early sixties and has a smooth, gray bob and a pleasant face untouched by Botox. I think she’s had a happy life.

I lean back and focus on the irregularly sized holes in the ceiling tiles, trying not to tense up against the business end of the speculum. Luckily, she knows what she’s doing and it barely hurts.

“How’s the little one?”

“She’s great. She’s two already.”

“Still not decided on having more?”

Her voice is coming from down between my ankles.

“Uh, I just got divorced actually, so I have enough on my plate right now.”

Telling people about my divorce while my bodily cavities are propped open feels like one step too far.

“Oh. Well, you’re only thirty-five, you have time.”

Fortunately, my doctor is quick. She finishes taking the sample and finally removes the speculum. She lowers the lights and prepares the ultrasound wand by squirting gel on it.

“So, are we losing you to Norway?”

“No, no danger of that yet.”

I’ve only gone back once after I left at twenty-nine, six years ago. My family has consistently lobbied me to move back home ever since I got my master’s degree. They doubled down on their pleas when Nick and I split up and I became alone with Ella most of the time.

As she begins the ultrasound examination, I watch the shapes of my inner organs balloon like elusive deep-sea creatures against the murky display. I chew my lip and think I see something unfamiliar, but then again, I always do. It’s beyond me how she can make any sense of these images.

“How’s it looking?”

She’s quiet for a while, clicking and dragging the measurement line against one shape.

“Hmm, it looks like there’s a small cyst. But it should disappear on its own.”

“So, it’s not like the previous ones.”

“No.”

“Does that mean I shouldn’t worry?”

“Yes. How is your pain these days?”

“Good, by my standards. I keep up the meditation, acupuncture, that sort of thing. But it’s been better since the pregnancy. I’m just worried that it won’t last.”

Actually, I haven’t seen my acupuncturist in a long time, which is maybe a sign of improved health in itself.

“Still, you seem to be doing surprisingly well,” the doctor says as I sit up, fussing with the hospital gown so that it spreads down to my knees.

“Try not to worry. You never worry about the right things anyway, my mother always said.”

Well.

Still, I leave her office feeling basically intact as I walk a few avenues west to catch the subway home. I am glad to be in New York, despite how exhausting it sometimes is to maintain life here. As long as I can keep my health insurance, there’s undeniable glamour in having these giant, iconic buildings and straight, gingko tree-lined streets be the set for our daily life. I notice the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off the buildings as I cross an avenue; and as the yellow cabs swarm at the stoplight, I get that sense of spaciousness, of being the main character in a movie, and reflect that fourteen-year-old me would have loved this. She was obsessed with things being beautiful and exciting, always eager to be delighted. How hopeful that girl was. The chain of things I wanted when I was younger, the links stretching backwards to angrier, more innocent and optimistic versions of me.

BACK ON THE Upper West Side, my upstairs neighbors are watching Ella. They’ve fed her dinner and she’s ready for bed. When Madeline opens the door to let me in, Ella is sitting on her backpack in the hallway of their apartment. The hallway is dark and cramped, the floor covered in shoes of all sizes. I hear Madeline’s husband laugh in the other room and the chirps of their youngest, Sophie. My heart lifts and simultaneously aches at the sight of Ella’s tiny legs in her little jeans. She turns her round, blue eyes to me and runs over and hugs my legs, pressing her face against my thighs. I put a hand on her warm, silky head.

“She insisted on waiting for you in the hallway since dinner,” Madeline says with a resigned smile. That’s my girl. So shy but so firm. I squat down to kiss her hair and poke her belly gently. To avoid allergic reactions, I usually try to embrace her without touching my bare skin to her before I can change her clothes and give her a bath. But she gives me a secret, bright smile and I lift her, squeezing her warm, little body against mine, feeling her hands and her face against my neck. I thank Madeline before we head downstairs to our apartment, Ella’s backpack, coat and boots clasped in my other hand.

“Did you have fun, lillepus?” I ask her in the stairwell.

She shakes her head.

“Not even a little bit? Not even with the cat?”

“The cat’s name is Joe!”

I fiddle with the lock and, in the end, I have to put her down. I breathe a sigh of relief as I close the door behind us and take in the familiar smells of our tiny apartment: clean laundry, yesterday’s cooking, and the warm, sweet scent of her.

I take off my coat and get a wet wipe to wash her face and hands. I know I’ll have painful, itchy patches of bright red allergic reactions on the skin on my neck all night because of hugging her earlier, even though I am washing my skin now. Children are of the moment. Either you’re there with them or you’re not.

*

Death drop: Similar to the back sit-spin; it involves a jump, as in the flying camel, but the skater drops immediately to a back sit position.

—Skate: 100 Years of Figure Skating by Steve Milton

*

I TRY TO talk to my sister Ingrid as well as one of my parents each weekend. They divorced many years ago, a decision that was probably wise, but handled badly. I run all medical news past my father, who’s a doctor. He must worry, but he never tells me, for which I’m grateful. My conversations with my mother, who’s a nurse, usually revolve around other people we know. On Sunday morning, I sit on the sofa in the living room in front of my laptop. It’s a bright day and there are plush toys strewn around. I can see the wooden panels on the wall behind my mother on the screen. She is planning her retirement in a few years. It’s a rainy day in Bergen and she has begun to pick the invasive Iberia slugs from her garden for the season.

Her voice goes up an octave when she talks to Ella. She always speaks Norwegian, though Ella replies in English. I try to let them talk amongst themselves, but they both seem to want me in the mix. Ella finishes telling her about our neighbor’s cat before suddenly feeling shy and wandering off. I ask about my aunt Elsa. I rearrange my hair so it won’t look so flat in the little window of myself on the screen and try to think of something to say to end the call. Instead, my mother takes charge.

“So, how are you?”

“I’m okay. Just exhausted.”

“Well, if you lived closer, I could help you out more.” Her voice is tense. I don’t have a lot of adult conversations with my mother, because once Ella goes to bed, when it would be natural to have those conversations, my mother is fast asleep, six hours ahead of us in Norway. I feel the weight of being the only parent in the room these days, always responsible, but remembering my mother talking about how much she sacrificed for me doesn’t help. It only makes it clearer that, most of the time, there is no way of getting across the gulfs between people.

“Maybe I could take a little trip next month and help you out a bit,” she suggests, but then pauses. “Or, well, that’s close to the summer. I’ll have to look at tickets.”

I wish she could be here tomorrow and just take control of everything the way she did when Ella was a newborn. The sudden longing makes me want to cry.

“That would be nice.”

My voice cracks embarrassingly, which we both ignore.

She studies my face carefully on the screen.

“Oh, by the way!”

My mother pixelates a little and her voice in the speakers turns clangy so I don’t catch what she’s saying at first—only the name Kjetil.

“What, my Kjetil?”

“Yeah, he’s moving to New York for work.”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what Kjetil does these days, but six years ago it was completely and thoroughly impossible for him to find a job in New York.

“Uh. That’s nice for him.”

“He’s divorced, you know. He wanted a change is what Janne said. Wanted to get out of Norway. Well, you get it.”

“Yeah.”

I note the intensity of my emotions, the familiar mix of bitterness and sadness tempered with what my life is now—Ella, New York City, responsibilities, adulthood. Something like fear. But there’s a little sliver of panicky excitement too.

ALL DAY, I try unsuccessfully to put Kjetil out of my mind.

I wake up Monday morning, after a night of chaotic dreams, and my shoulders and arms, which have been painful for weeks, feel even worse. My right shoulder and my lower arms are cold, stiff countries of their own. Other days, they feel hot and nauseating. How am I going to get through the work week like this? I look up a local clinic to start the physical therapy I’ve been putting off for weeks. Luckily, they have an opening for tomorrow afternoon.

Ella is two. She is very pale and often shy around other people. Nick worries that she’s too quiet, but I don’t think so. It’s a cultural difference, too. In Norway, being quiet is always the lesser crime. She seems sharper than other kids her age, at least to me. She just likes to think things through on her own before talking. She looks like me at that age. Her hair is fine and light and her eyes a clear blue. In winter, she sometimes reminds me of a little jellyfish. She’s exquisitely formed, neither plump nor limp, but her small features appear to be made of something a tiny bit too frail. As though, if you pricked her, clear liquid would leak out and she would disappear completely. When I see her picking at her oatmeal in the mornings, I always think of what my mother used to say to me when I was an underweight child who hated eating:

“You have to eat your dinner or you’ll shrink until there’s nothing left of you but a little wet spot!”

Mornings alone with Ella are my favorite time of day. I pad quietly into her bedroom, a tiny alcove with yellow wallpaper. The apartment was too small for us before Nick moved out. I lift Ella out of her bed in the corner and carry the sleep-scented bundle of her into the warm bathroom, then set her carefully down on her feet in the middle of the floor. Ella stands there quietly blinking and yawning while I unbutton her footie pajamas and dress her. NPR plays at low volume on the radio. It takes about half an hour before Ella starts speaking in the mornings. Before that, the only noise that comes from her is the sound of her small breaths when my ear is next to her mouth. She is perfectly self-contained, a peaceful little animal.

ON TUESDAY, when it’s time for physical therapy, I leave work early to locate the building on the Upper West side. In the small waiting room that still has Christmas lights up, I notice I’m the only person under fifty. Uncomfortable chairs with wooden armrests line the walls. As usual, I’m too short to reach the floor and the back of the chair at the same time. I perch on the front of the seat, with my legs crossed. The low table in the center of the room is covered in interior design magazines for people who own property. No one in this room does, I feel fairly certain, but I tensely flip through one as I wait. I scan photos of all the different landscapes people wake up to—properties in Dallas, Naples, Switzerland—vast foyers and wide, sweeping staircases, empty white walls, high ceilings, shiny parquet floors, sunlight spilling in from green gardens. Imagine filling those large spaces with your personality.

I haven’t seen a new medical professional on my own in a while and even when it was a common occurrence in my late twenties and early thirties, I never stopped being nervous. It felt like I was waiting for an exam, a moment to perform and be judged. Since Ella’s birth, life has been miraculously uneventful when it comes to my health. I read somewhere that stress can worsen endometriosis, even bring forth cysts—now there’s a thought that brings a surge of cortisol. I try to stop this line of thinking there, but of course I can’t. The echo of hospital corridors, bright overhead lights, texture of institutional sheets, and that nauseous 4 a.m. feeling crowd in on me. I look at the other people in the waiting room, the middle-aged man with the cane and the tiny, hunched old woman, imagining the suffering that brings them here. What do we do when health runs out?

Finally, a young woman comes out and calls out: “Laura Fuh-juh …?”

I correct her automatically: “Fjellstad, yes. Like in ‘fjord.’ It’s Norwegian.”

I saw a physical therapist ten years ago in Norway, but she was a different breed than this polished, ponytailed professional, who introduces herself as Chelsea and leads me into a shabby room with a low ceiling filled with benches and exercise equipment. The room feels dim, even under the wash of fluorescence. When I look at the objects in the room, I can’t identify what exactly makes it all feel so scruffy. Nothing is in and of itself shabby. The floor that, at first glance, looks like old cracked linoleum is in fact made up of thick, shock-absorbing rubber squares that fit together like puzzle pieces and the benches and the machines aren’t too worn, either. There’s a pile of white towels on a table. A large man with an even larger shirt and droopy shoulders is folding another pile of white towels, making a rough stack.

Chelsea sits me down on a plastic chair and picks up a clipboard. She has broad cheekbones, expertly applied eye shadow, and long ash blonde hair tied in a swinging ponytail. She speaks quickly, smiling with slightly crooked teeth, every sentence ending on an up.

“So, what have we here?” she says.

“Well, I’ve been having pain in my shoulders and arms for a while.” I touch my shoulders awkwardly. “But lately it’s making it hard to work, so … tendonitis, apparently.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I do administrative office work—it’s all on the computer.”

In fact, despite my efforts, ever since my pregnancy, my posture has become molded forward more and more, into an increasingly defeated hunch with a touch of gorilla. I’m by no means fat, but my shape feels slightly wrong; clothes don’t suit me as well as they used to.

“This is what we call a defensive posture?” Chelsea says. “Your shoulders coming forward make your chin come forward too, which shortens the muscles in the back of your neck?”

She tests my arms by squeezing them different ways, telling me to resist the pressure and to let her know if anything is painful. As she bends over me, I can’t help but notice how lovely the skin on Chelsea’s neck is, smooth and slightly pearlescent. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone their youthfully slim plumpness; their wealth of collagen. She has an inkling that my real problem isn’t where it hurts the most. She traces the pain from my tingling fingers; it travels straight up my wrists and winds itself tightly around my upper arms diagonally like ribbons on a ballet slipper. The ribbons circle my shoulders and continue down my back to between the shoulder blades. There, they form a grid of tension around the spine where it pools before the concave of the neck. Higher up, the grid turns into a tight brace around the neck, the muscles where my body becomes my head are hard and numb.

My eyes follow Chelsea as she starts to take notes on her clipboard.

“Is there any hope for me?” I smile faintly.

Chelsea gives me a friendly smile that’s only a tiny bit patronizing.

“If you do your exercises and ice your shoulders a lot, we’ll fix you right up!”

She attaches wires to my neck, covers them with heat packs she picks out of a steaming vat, and wraps me in towels. She starts up the electric stimulation massage and increases its power click by click until my neck starts buzzing. It’s a strange sensation, but not unpleasant. The warmth, gentle buzzing, and soothing weight of the pack makes my eyelids sink. Sitting still on the chair amidst bantering employees and patients—being where I’m supposed to be without having to do anything—is wonderful.

Chelsea hops up on the bench behind my chair for the five-minute massage that comes after. Her hands are strong, and within seconds find a frozen knot between my shoulder and neck. She chats to her colleague about her gel manicure. All I can do is sit still and close my eyes, desperate for the massage to continue, even though it’s painful.

It’s darker than normal behind my eyelids, and suddenly he’s there: Kjetil. The comforting pull of him, his warmth, the scent of his skin, his voice and laugh. But there is the terrible soreness of it too, like the taste of blood. When I moved here without Kjetil, it wasn’t just getting over one relationship and going on to the next. It’s as if I drowned crossing the Atlantic Ocean and this is an entirely different life.

When the massage ends, I open my eyes and feel disoriented, like I’ve been asleep.

Chelsea tells me to sit at the arm bike, which is exactly what the name suggests. I feel silly making big circles with my arms to move the pedals, like I’m cartoon-swimming.

“Do you work out?” Chelsea asks.

“Well, I try, but it’s not so easy for a single mother,” I say in a voice that sounds strange even to me. I feel tenderized, weird, on the verge of tears. I know this twenty-five-year-old won’t have anything to offer by way of comfort. Still, I find I want something from her—from her bright, uncomplicated world where nothing is broken.

“Aw, well,” Chelsea says, unmoved. “Let me see if I can’t come up with some exercises you can do at home!”

I resume biking, feeling chastened.

THE ARM PROBLEM seems to be divorce-related: it reappeared for the first time in years around the same time Nick and I split up. My posture deteriorated along with the relationship. I’ve tried to keep it under control with an occasional massage and some vaguely remembered exercises, but for weeks now, my arms have been painful even at the beginning of the workday.

My marriage let me pretend to be a normal person for a few years. There was the happy start; of gulping down everything simple and tasty after being heartbroken over Kjetil and years of illness. Then, getting pregnant without having to go through IVF was such a stroke of magical luck that I let go of how much easier it all would’ve been if I’d been in my home country. I was able to lay any doubts about my location in the world and the father of my child completely to rest. It felt like the exercises I learned to do to avoid eye strain while working on the computer: turn away from the screen and let my eyes land on something far away. My eye muscles would strain to see rooftops in the distance before suddenly, blissfully, remember how to relax on the blue, clear sky. That feeling of more territory, regained space—I’d remember how to straighten my spine and take a deep breath, how to live in the world.

I could make peace with anything as long as I could have Ella.

In time, though, there was only a lack of resonance and a constant supply of irritation between Nick and me. It was not true love. It was something smaller.

“Some people can’t handle child rearing,” my mother had said, in that way that is meant to be supportive but comes with the aftertaste of criticism. “You know, statistically, that’s when people go nuts, right?”

In my mind, the failure of our marriage hinged on him giving in to the temptation of secretly believing my illness was my fault. That there was some abstract, heroic, grand gesture to be performed, but I refused to do it. He would resist the drudgery of the ongoing pain by thinking that if the roles were reversed, he would have solved it all, somehow. To be fair, Nick probably didn’t really realize what being ill meant until after Ella was born and we were so overwhelmed that neither of us could hide unappealing traits for long.

Just as well to be alone.

I’m lucky that he is neither unstable nor gratuitously mean. At times, I dare to think that the worst of it is over. I’ve stopped running my tongue over the wound. The way we share Ella seems more or less right. We both watch her closely but she seems to be doing okay so far. I work full time at Scandinavia House—but Nick works long hours and travels a lot, so Ella is still mine most of the time.

Once I got my new life stumbling along on its newborn calf legs, it was a relief to live alone again—not the gaping hole of loneliness, with double the difficulties, that I’d feared. In between the heartbreak and the dark thoughts that still dominate, there are pauses. I’ve picked up writing again. After I make it through the mornings, the commute, and workday, getting us both home and fed and Ella to sleep, there is occasionally a tiny space in which I am alone with myself. I’m exhausted, but every once in a while, I wipe the kitchen table and sit down for a half an hour and put my hands on the keyboard of my aging laptop. I leave old manuscripts alone and just type. After a while, something flows through me, like I’ve plugged into a current. It’s a profound relief to not be disturbed. Old creative muscles reawaken and it’s downright joyful to see that I can still write—even after two years where it seemed like I gave up everything I had to have my daughter. There is privacy in my own head—I wait and see if anything will happen; I trust the process of it. I don’t have to show it to anyone, but it’s not nothing—at times it’s just a random flow of descriptive or exclaiming words, and at times it’s something tiny and green that unfurls slowly. Other times it’s something dark and large that makes a racket falling down the stairs, threatening to break things in its path. Whatever I create is only mine.

OVER THE NEXT few days, I feel vaguely out of control. There are stretches of unbidden daydreams of my early days with Kjetil, when we were still students. He was so happy and generous. Waking up in his room with sunlight pouring in, turning over to see his smiling, brown eyes right there, his hands and his warm hairiness, how our bodies fit together so well, so much kissing that the scratchiness of his chin gave me a rash. He would grow stubbly by the evening even with a daily morning shave, so he approached his shaving ritual with precision—that neat line of black hair at his temples and neck, even when he was a student and everyone else in Bergen was wearing their hair seventies style shaggy. I remember the sensation of his smooth skin against my lips as I kissed the back of his neck. It’s s so vivid even after all these years that it feels dangerous. I’ve worked very hard to close that part of the past off and managing to do so was a question of survival. It’s so delicious to crack the door a little. All the color and light that comes from there.

One evening, I almost fall asleep when I put Ella to bed, but instead I get up and call my friend Tatiana to talk to an adult. I tell her a little of the story of Kjetil while cleaning up the kitchen and she asks why I don’t just call him up. I sit down on the sofa. My living room is a mess, still too empty in places yet cluttered with toys, magazines, and clothes. I lean my head against the wall behind the sofa and stare at the patchy ceiling.

“Because it almost killed me when it ended,” I say, aware that I sound melodramatic.

Do I want to talk to him? No. Too risky. I should ask my mother what neighborhood he lives in. I could probably avoid ever seeing him if I didn’t contact him. Kjetil met his wife right after I left the country. There was some overlap of these relationships after I had left, but before we broke up officially. It was a period in our lives when neither of us handled anything particularly well. Still, I have considerable bitterness about these things. It feels cold and stuck, and sometimes hot and nauseous, like my right shoulder. Tatiana knows I had surgeries for endometriosis before I came to the US and that chronic pain was more of an issue when I first arrived than it is now. She knows that I still have to ration my energy and be careful about everything and still, regardless of what I do, pain still claims a certain percentage of my life. But even when someone knows the details of my illness, even if they were interested in understanding it—a tiny group of people—how could I make them understand what sort of world I was living in at the time? I could barely rest because the pain was constant. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like there wasn’t enough light in the world.

“I was sick,” I say to Tatiana. “I never thought I’d have even this much of a normal life.”

Tatiana is silent.

“I don’t even know if he’d want to talk to me. He was so angry too, when I ended it.”

“Well, you’re not going to know unless you try, right?” Tatiana says, eager to end this conversation with a positive spin.

“Have you given any more thought to getting a dating profile like I told you to? Maybe it would take your mind off things. Or motivate you to call him. Being single in your thirties is not the same as in your twenties, believe me.”

The thought of trying to make myself attractive to strangers is daunting, to say the least. The private palenesses, smells, and tender spots of other people’s bodies. The last time I actively dated was before I met Kjetil. How bright and easy my life was back then—how miraculously comfortable I was with him. During the first orgasm he ever gave me, in his dark bedroom with the lights of passing cars flickering across the ceiling, I kept seeing myself on the ice rink, trying and trying to get a difficult pirouette right, almost getting it but losing speed, almost, almost—then by waiting a millisecond longer to switch legs and using my arms to harness all that speed, finally—perfect, glorious spinning, balanced as if it could go on forever. That was just the beginning. The mere presence of his body seemed to put mine at ease.

I’D FLED ALL my ties in Norway, but when I became a mother, I found taking care of a vulnerable baby surprisingly doable. People say no one talks about the worst parts of childcare, but it seemed like I hardly heard anything else before having a kid. People who expect the pregnant body to be graceful and wise, who go in expecting parenting to run smoothly and to always be flooded by feelings of joy and rightness, have had a different kind of life than mine. I spent the thirty hours of her birth in a state of suspended dread, receiving help from the nice nurses at every turn, just like I had during my surgeries, and was happy that we both came out of it alive and me with about the same amount of hospital-related PTSD as before.

After years of thinking that needing help or caring for other people would be the worst thing in the world, Ella’s arrival in my life was something of a revelation. Taking care of her was not impossible. I did not resent her for needing me. Being needed every second of the day felt confining, exhausting and overwhelming at times, but not wrong. I could work with difficult things. I didn’t want out. All of us are tethered to life by love.

Ella and I needed each other and we were okay. Her small, warm body against mine. Her little face, covered in tears so quickly from the first wail. I know every single sound that leads up to crying when I hear her fall and bump her head on the table. I scoop her up to intercept the tears. Her legs clamping around me and her fists that clutch my shirt. I hold her on my hip, lean against the kitchen counter and talk to her in a low voice. She was born, she filled out, she lengthened, learned things, was deposited down on her feet, started to speak. She can’t be left alone even for the duration of a shower or a bathroom visit. She can’t open a door. She can’t make a phone call. It’s such a relief to have some time to myself when she’s with Nick, but I think about her all the time anyway, like I’m lovesick. Her little mop of fluffed up silky, white hair on the top back of her beloved head. Her sticky little fingers that grab, her hot biscuit breath when she cries into my face. Her tiny, perfect teeth with a miniscule space between the two front ones.

As a child, I was always in the hospital—asthmatic, allergic to more and more things, wheezing, coughing, itching, always a bellyache for some reason or another. My tests results were always borderlining something dangerous that required more extensive testing to rule out. Somehow, though, Ella is amazingly—so far, knock on wood—in perfect health. I tell myself no one knows anything but today anyway, and even if everything were to go wrong, pediatric medicine has evolved a lot since the early ’80s in Norway. My therapist once told me that it is common for pediatricians to fall out with parents, because they prioritize bonding with the children. That’s not how it was with Dr. Simonsen. Certain things were done to me as a very young child that adults wouldn’t be put through without general anesthesia these days. A needle of sedatives in my pale thigh while I sat in my mother’s lap; an enormous machine that hung from the ceiling and Dr. Simonsen with the huge, black eyebrows standing by the bench, his white doctor’s coat with the buttons right by my face in a darkened room. I tried to tell them to stop because I was retching, but soon discovered that my protests had no effect. Hands emerged to hold me down on the hard bench. Years of cooperation only to find that there never was any choice.

Afterwards, my mother wheeled me through the echoing corridors that connected the children’s ward to the main hospital building in a stroller that belonged to the hospital, even though I was way too old, almost four.

On most occasions, I held my mother’s hand. She was so stylish, with her Princess Di-style hair, her high-heeled tan boots and loose roll neck sweater. Walking down the hallways of shiny linoleum with the colored stripes, past the bathroom and the red sofas with the ragged children’s books, the partitions of blonde lacquered wood, the statue of the lady with the baby. Straight into the room where Dr. Simonsen awaited, the large-eyed teddy bears with their hard, smiling doll faces and big stiff ears perched on the windowsill. I could see trees through the glass pane and there was a white cotton sheet on the examination bench. I preferred to climb onto the bench by myself with the help of a chair, rather than be lifted onto it. Afterwards they weighed me in my underwear. I always weighed less than they had hoped.

*

Sit spin: a spin done in a sitting position. The body is low to the ice, with the skating knee bent and the free leg extended.

*

THE WORST FLARE-UP in months of my regular abdominal pain arrives through a night of bad sleep. I struggle through layers of shallow sleep, half-dreams riddled with endless administrative tasks to complete and ceaseless disapproval from the world. As always, the pain glows around my left side, a sinister mix of aching and nausea—not anywhere in particular that I can locate, though I grab my skin and press my palm into my side as if I could move it that way. When I lie on my back, the pressure of my weight against the bed is sore but lying on my side doesn’t help. The pain level fluctuates from just below what requires some kind of action and a little worse than that. I can only take the minimum dosage of painkillers before work.

I can barely wait to leave my hot bed in the stuffy, tiny room but I also need to sleep. I know the day will be no better. There’s clamor before dawn from the New York City trash trucks that have always seemed unnecessarily noisy. The morning feels never-ending, every step of our routine tiresome and quarrelsome. First, Ella undresses all the way down to her diaper while I have my back turned and am making breakfast so we have to start from scratch again. Then, just as we’re about to leave, she runs back into the kitchen and spills juice all over herself so I have to wash the stickiness off her and change her shirt yet again. We have both shed tears before we say goodbye, though I hide mine from her, closing the bathroom door for thirty seconds while she howls at me to let her in.

Up the stairs and down. On the train, I notice myself keeping the cheerful commentary more or less going to Ella, even though I’m so drained that my voice is just a faint puff drawn from a shallow pint of air. A ghost of fatigue resembling a human being.

During my commute to work on the crowded subway after I’ve dropped Ella off, I’m so exhausted I actually consider asking a stranger for their seat. I look around at the shuttered faces around me, all of us swaying with the carriage as the noise ebbs and flows. Would anyone take pity on me? Not for the first time, I think to myself that a moment of desperate need is the worst possible time to have to ask for help. If I didn’t need it, it would be no problem. If I were doing it on someone else’s behalf, I would almost certainly be successful, full of confidence and righteousness. But I don’t look like I need help—I look like a regular healthy person, just crankier and less attractive. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something about my face when I’m in pain and struggling that makes people not want to help me. On those days, people seem to be less polite than usual, and I can’t count on even the smallest courtesy.

I catch my reflection in the window of the subway car. My mouth is downturned, eyes dull and frantic. I look like I’m convinced that something horrible is about to happen, or like I’m about to start yelling in a desperate and high-pitched voice. If someone misunderstood my request or simply chose to be cruel, it would crush me. I just can’t take that risk. I have to remain standing, folding in on myself and raking energy from the corners to get to work, running a private but familiar survival program in which I would sacrifice limbs to keep going.

I can’t stop evaluating every surface as a potential place to rest. Even the speckled floor looks inviting at this point. It costs so much to stay standing, my body leaking energy with every sway and turn the train makes. I can’t lean against the pole because of all the hands holding on to it. My midriff glows with nauseous, dull pain that seems to have turned up the volume the second I dropped off Ella. Can I really not have the tiny amount of space my ass would take up on some surface in this city? Just a miniature shelf is all I need. I can’t be this tired. Maybe I just can’t hack this life on my own. Is my stomach ruined again? I have to get back on some serious endometriosis meds immediately. Why didn’t I start the drugs right after Ella was born? What the fuck was I thinking, going with only hormonal birth control? Did I think I was some sort of regular person? I’m out of practice. Is this the new cyst I’m feeling? Or is there actually something new wrong with me? My whole life is just a story of things going wrong. Think only small thoughts for now. You felt alone in caring for Ella when you were with Nick, too.

Now at least I can do things the way I want. And he never was good on a day like this anyway. I would have been able to ask him to take Ella home, but it would have cost me. I would feel like his eyes were on me, keeping score. He would want to place himself in the middle of it and take control of the situation, without listening to me, without acknowledging the skill set I’ve acquired through my lifetime as a patient. It would require fighting, insisting, explaining—and still he wouldn’t remember, the next time it came up. He would blame me for being irritable, for rationing my painkillers. It would come down to some kind of political issue, to the raw fact of our bodies alone in a room together, where I was simply unable to make him understand that living in mine, the way it is, isn’t optional.

I have a lifetime of training in looking normal, in seeming like I’m not in enormous trouble. I’ll get up the stairs. Then, rest a little on my feet because there are no benches anywhere in this city, unless you’ve already spent all your energy and walked all the way into a park, or that ridiculous set-up on Broadway where there are benches only on the center partition, with the cars rushing past on both sides as if daring you to try and relax. My purse takes a toll on my balance. I should start using a backpack. Then I just have to get through the station hall and down those blocks and into the elevator and down the corridor to my desk. Even if you can see where you’re going, even if you’re almost there, all these flat, straight streets, you still have to walk them. If someone could just help me. Don’t think about that now. If I can sit still for an hour or two, eat and drink something, I’ll recharge, I’ll be okay. Maybe I’ll treat myself to a cab for one of the stretches home. But it’ll be rush hour, and too expensive. I put in extra work hours on the days Ella’s not with me, to have a little leeway for days like this. Luckily, I’m efficient and can cover a lot of ground when I’m feeling well. I’ve trained myself to stop wasting energy on being overly polite. I cannot afford to squander even a drop.

Will I raise Ella in a single stretch of gritted teeth survival mode? Will she ever even know a version of me that’s not exhausted? Will I be the one she will blame for everything, the only one there? Will she remember me closing the door on her this morning? My brain whirring, I’m still on the train, still on my feet, still needing to lie down.

If there was something really wrong, I would have to let Nick have her. Would he even manage? He wouldn’t allow me to take Ella to Norway. I let a moment of complete and utter miserable panic rush over me like a hot flash as the subway lights flicker off for a second.

I would be thrown back into my old element. I would have to give up on making my life work. There would be hospital rooms with their terrible, noisy Feng Shui and their ghosts of panics and agonies past. Vomiting in front of strangers. Needles through the skin, a million times. The weight of my drained body against the white hospital bedsheets. They would do everything they could to help me and that would only be about 40 percent of what I need. A miserable chill spreads through my chest. What the fuck would I do? Can I really trust Nick to bring my daughter to see me? Could I let her see me sick and weak? How would her life be without me in it? Her father would raise her too carelessly, without the attention to detail she needs. She would be an American through and through. Who would tell her about me? I would wash up like a corpse on the riverbank of the Hudson with all the other unlucky people in this charming and merciless country.

All my strength, talents, and efforts that could do nothing in the end, solve nothing, lead nowhere. Caught again, caught forever, ruined, never getting away, everything gone. Oh my God.

I picture myself lying flat on my back on the floor of my apartment, just inside the closed front door, crying loudly—my throat fully opened to the skies to accommodate my hopeless grief. Misfortune towering over me like an old-fashioned knight about to sever my head once and for all.

That image feels good. Something in the top of my chest is soothed enough by it that I don’t start crying right there. The train finally rattles into my stop and I get off.

EVEN AS I get through the week and the pain slowly eases, I can’t stop thinking of how things could go wrong. The fragile structures of our hopes and how unnecessarily thoroughly they’re struck down. Our dreams could be wrecked a lot more easily anyway, with just a change in the air and light. The smallness of what we need—one more day of safety, another day of touching and talking to the people in our lives as if we have all the time in the world.

When I was in my mid-twenties, a friend of my sister and I named Elin succumbed to an exceptionally virulent type of cervical cancer that laid the land desolate in the course of just five months. She was pale and thin in photos taken during the months leading up to the diagnosis, but her doctors kept telling her to come back later, that it was just period pain. The cancer progressed unimpaired. She was taking classes at the university at the time, laughing with wine-stained teeth, discussing feminist tactics with the full expectation of seeing their effects on the world. She had long, straight, brown hair and sharp eyes that would not let you get away with any bullshit. Her laugh was loud. She had such courage and dignity at twenty-eight, much younger than I am now. The surgery at the start of her treatment included a hysterectomy and removal of her ovaries, which sent her straight into menopause. She gave an interview to the local paper about the case against her doctor, the one who failed to discover the cancer. She talked about how she had been raised not to question the authority of doctors and bitterly referenced Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir when she said: “This is the story of a well-raised and dutiful young woman.”

Elin was angry that the brochure they gave her about treatment only mentioned the effects on her sexuality in a few sentences addressed to a husband—angry at everyone who expressed concern about the loss of her ability to have children. “Are they fucking kidding me? Remove everything, just fix me!” None of it worked. Her piercing, terrified eyes in that photo that accompanied the article; her newly pronounced clavicles showing in an elegant, black, scoop neck top. She was buried in April.

I flash to myself falling and crushing Ella under me when I walk down subway stairs. I hold on to her hand hard on the platform. Cars screeching around corners and creepy-looking people on the train set off my anxiety, not to mention the possible implications of unfamiliar twinges in my stomach, or wondering if Ella is looking too pale and thin. I don’t know how my parents survived all those years when I was in and out of hospital as a child, even though they were a nurse and a doctor. They managed, despite the pain of those memories for me. My mother, younger than I am now, alone in the room with respected doctors in the big city, would even dare to question their opinion when they wanted to redo testing yet again. People do what they have to, I guess. It can’t be thought about. I just have to make one phone call home at a time and try to be present with them. Thinking of their pain in relation to mine is too much for my mind. I have to carry it elsewhere in my body—the back of my neck, perhaps. Or between the shoulder blades, where it stops my breath from drawing completely.

You can’t always reach everyone. Even with your very best efforts, you can’t always make yourself understood.

I take the subway to Ella’s daycare and from there to work, retracing the journey on the way home. I don’t have the luxury of being out of control. I want to be calm and collected. There are to-do lists, dinners to cook, healthy lunches to pack, insurance companies to deal with, physical therapy to attend, and the subway to go in and out of at least four times every day. A billion opportunities to not lose my cool when chaos threatens to take over. Shopping, laundry, the eternal cycle of adding and removing snacks and clothes from Ella’s tiny backpack, the work of trying to close off our small life to trouble, not leaving even the smallest crack where it can get in.

ONE MORNING IN the privacy of my cubicle, walls covered in Ella’s drawings, I push away thoughts of Kjetil by finally creating an online dating profile. I’m only going to have a quick look anyway, so it won’t matter what I call myself, but I spend more than a half hour trying to come up with a good username while keeping one ear on my boss, who’s on the phone a few doors down.

Something makes me check all the boxes for what I’m interested in: Men, Women, and Casual, although I haven’t been on a date with a woman in ten years. It wasn’t because I stopped finding women attractive, but the scope of my vision had narrowed somehow, along with everything else. Every situation seemed to have just one outcome.

After some doubt, I attach an old, blurry full-length photo I find in an old vacation email. I’m fairly sure my face isn’t completely recognizable, much to my relief. I only write a few brief sentences about books and music.

Still, within the day, I receive messages from men who politely inquire about my day and my preferences in literature. It amazes me that none of them are crude. It seems the women on the site aren’t going to run down my door without me making an effort, but men are just offering themselves up. I click through picture after picture of all these attractive young men I, in theory, could go out and meet as soon as I can get a babysitter. This is a much better idea than thinking about the past. There they are, displaying their tan, ripped stomachs at what seems to be an eternal barbecue chock-full of handsome men, laughing at the camera with beer glasses raised.

I lean close to the screen. How much will I need to do to my body before I can show it to anyone? Will a razor and a month of nightly Pilates in front of the TV be enough?

AT PHYSICAL THERAPY, I’m again installed under the hot packs on the plastic chair between two tables, my eyelids dipping. I listen to the goings-on in the clinic over the soundtrack of scratchy radio songs. A Latino man brings in a child-sized old lady with some kind of ski cap on her head. I wonder if she’s his mother or grandmother. Either seems possible. They sit down in the half cubicle next to me. Chelsea takes down the woman’s medical history. The old woman speaks in Spanish and the man translates. She recently had surgery on her arm and has at least one kind of cancer. I’m not sure if I hear the word “terminal.” Both the man and the old woman seem passive and exhausted and it sounds like the man is only translating parts of what the old woman is saying. They’re here to possibly relieve some of her pain after surgery. I hear Chelsea examining the woman, asking cheerful questions in her bright voice as if she didn’t hear a word they said, as if it’s irrelevant to her. Worse, it’s as if she’s there to somehow correct them, show them how to be less troublesome. Or am I projecting? I turn my head the other way, glad it’s not me, not today.

As it is, water still boils. Oatmeal still swells. The neighbor’s slim gray dog still jumps happily every time she sees us in the hallway, and Ella, who’s a little scared of her, still greets her with a delighted, timid smile.

*

Cross-foot spin: An upright spin in which the skater gradually places the free foot behind the spinning foot and continues the spin on two feet with toes together.

*

ELLA HAS BEEN up since 5:30 a.m., moving through the apartment like a little chaos train, dropping off bunny rabbits, books, and small outfits wherever she goes. At one point, for ten wonderful minutes I lie back on the sofa while she arranges my hair like a fan against the fabric of the seatback. She stands next to me on the seat, and I hold on to her legs so she won’t fall. She is completely absorbed, and I can admire the delicate precision of her small, serious face above me in peace. She is humming, and occasionally weaves a few real words and some made-up ones into a song that sounds vaguely familiar. I gaze at her round cheeks and rosebud mouth, her slender neck, how everything underneath her translucent skin is working and purring along perfectly and I experience a wave of happiness and immense gratitude that seems to fill the apartment like sunlight. You and me.

We leave for Nick’s in the afternoon. I have an errand to do downtown so I’ve offered to drop her off for their weekend, but I’m also curious to see his place. He runs a business with two friends that seems to be doing well, some kind of software solution for real estate listings. His new apartment is not far from Chelsea Market. The doorman insists on calling him, even though I tell him we’re expected. In the end, Nick’s apartment turns out to be on the same floor as us, at the other end of a maze of carpeted floors.

Nick comes to the door as we arrive. Ella is quiet, but her eyes are twinkling and there’s a huge smile on her face. She lets go of my hand, and as she rushes to him, there is a moment where the three of us are all smiling, our eyes almost a little too bright. If this could have been hers, I think. I quell the familiar bargaining monologue in my brain. Nick lifts her and swings her like a pendulum. Her coat rides up under his large hands around her small body, revealing her little diaper bottom inside her thin wool tights my mother sends from Norway. I’m slightly taken aback by how tall he is again. I can smell his fabric softener. I note his jaw line when he laughs up at her. He is a good-looking man. His ash blond hair is getting a bit long, maybe starting to have a dash of gray in it. He is going to age well. Between the two of us, Ella could—in theory—emerge perfectly balanced in size and temperament. Not too large or too small, not too sensitive or too callous. Not too prone to tears, nor too prone to let herself off the hook too easily. When I think of it, I want her to have generous helpings of many of his traits—his tendency to be amused by the world, his confidence, entitlement, assuredness that he’ll be seen and listened to. I loved his largeness when we first met. He seemed so solid. There was a time when he was always laughing and flinging me around too. Ella reaches for the ceiling when his arms are stretched out and her laugh almost creates a Doppler effect as he swings her low again.

He reenters the apartment still swinging a squealing Ella and I follow in the trail of their mingling laughter. The apartment has hardwood floors, a lot of gray tones, but only has windows on one short end. Everything looks new. It probably has excellent air conditioning to balance it, but, personally, I would rather live a lot more shabbily if I could have more natural light and air. It’s quite stuffy in here. It’s none of my business now how he spends his money, of course. It’s a million times better that he’s doing well than the opposite.

I pry my fingers off that line of thinking and force myself to shake loose and be an adult. Everything is all right, Laura. Let it go.

“Congrats on the new place. Pretty fancy.”

“Thanks! Yeah, I got lucky.”

I lean against the doorway of a standard New York kitchen, narrow and small with a sink and fridge on one side and a stove on the other. It’s much prettier than my kitchen, mostly because everything is shiny and unused. The walls are painted gray, like the rest of the apartment. I’m relieved to see that I don’t wish it were mine, though I would kill for a dishwasher.

“I had some people over last night for a housewarming of sorts.”

“Did you have fun?” I hope I sound neutral.

“Yeah, yeah, everyone stayed late. I’m dragging a bit today.”

I feel so tired, suddenly, and it’ll be so long before I’m back at home to lie down. I usually dread my empty apartment after I drop her off, but I’m too exhausted for anything else. My shoulder hurts and I start rolling them. Does he know a lot of people I don’t by now?

“How’s work? Are your arms any better?”

“Fine … mostly fine. I just feel a bit overwhelmed lately. I’m getting physical therapy for my arms, though.”

“Oh, how’s that going?”

“Good, it’s helping, I think. Or I think it will, but I’ve been having some pain so far …”

“Well, should you be doing it if it’s making you worse?” He looks tired.

Ella has scampered off further into the apartment. Why did I start talking about this? He’s already uncooperative about picking her up on the days I have physical therapy, and I don’t want to give him ammunition against me. I really have to break the habit of telling him things as if they are still his business.

“Yeah, the physical therapist said these things often get worse before they get better. I’ve been ignoring the problem for a long time, so it does make sense.” I stand up straighter, try to convey the posture of a competent woman who takes care of herself.

He folds his arms in front of his chest and leans against the wall across from me.

“Well, I don’t know. If it’s supposed to make you better … how much are you paying? Lord knows you can’t afford for any more body parts to start malfunctioning. You’re not exactly low-maintenance as it is.”

I give him a death stare. He doesn’t realize exactly what he’s said, but he can tell he’s stepped in something. Nick is prickly about “always getting into trouble” with me, “no matter what he says.” Does he think I’m unable to take care of his daughter? I see myself through his eyes for a second, and I seem so fragile I can barely stand it. A new cyst. Well, fuck that. Half my life it looked like I was never going to be okay. But I’m still here, and I’m doing just fine.

“Jesus Christ, it’s exactly because there isn’t room for more trouble that I’m taking care of this problem.”

“What does your boss say about it? Aren’t you missing days already?”

“She can’t fire me. There’s the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“But you’re not disabled.”

I have no idea if I would be covered under the ADA. Still, I continue, forcing myself to speak quietly since Ella is in the next room:

“What if I am? Even if you don’t like the sound of it—it’s not a choice. It’s not difficult because I haven’t figured out the best fucking way of doing it. It just is difficult.”

I didn’t invent the difficulty of depending on people. It’s not a personality flaw of mine. The message is everywhere. The air is saturated with it—independence and strength and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (an image that is by its very nature impossible.) “Take complete responsibility for your life,” they say, as if the external forces don’t matter at all. As if it all comes down to personal effort and attitude. As if money, support, and privilege had nothing to do with how your life turns out. As if what decides a sick or disabled person’s fate isn’t medical help, access, benefits and rights, but the ability to perform some arbitrary athletic act on a reality TV show. As if this, like everything else doesn’t come down to money and power—do you have it or don’t you? As if even if all these things were in place, it didn’t take hard work just to maintain life, every day, for the rest of your life.

As though, if you need help in any way, you owe it to the world to tap-dance with a grin on your face for the rest of your days and supply photos they can superimpose their inspirational quotes over: “What’s your excuse? The only disability in life is a bad attitude!” To always feel blessed and grateful despite your life consisting of endless pain, no deciding power over your own life, no privacy and having to rely on people you did not choose to help you out. To answer all invasive questions lightly and cheerfully. To pretend to not see the hatred that is so often right under the surface.

The rest of us have to find a way to live and try to enjoy our lives even if we are always on the outside, even if they don’t even want to know about us. We have to find a way to live for and with each other, not them. To focus on where we can reach each other, not on those arenas where we will always, always lose. As long as we have enough support. Not all of it, but enough. As long as all your energy isn’t lost before you can even start.

I wish someone would try to convince me to lean on them like they do on TV, with those speeches saying it’s okay to rely on people. People chasing you down to confront you with your flaws in an interested and loving way, so they can tell you it’ll all be fine and that “we’re in it together.” That has yet to happen in my life.

Still so caught up in how things look on TV. What am I, a child?

“So, you’re just going to sue them when they fire you?”

“Fuck you, Nick.”

I see him pulling himself together.

“Fine, fine. I’m sorry.” He is stiff and angry. I’ve never gotten used to how apologizing is hardwired into Americans, and never know whether to take it at face value or as some hostile reflex, another way to fight. The words are in place, what more do you want? I don’t respond. Once, in the middle of a fight, Nick yelled, “Jesus, why can you never ever apologize? Were you raised by wolves?” Maybe I was.

Nick starts to clear the dining table irritably. The table is cluttered with plastic cartons from Whole Foods and plastic glasses and plates from plastic packaging marked Extra Heavy-Duty. Why should anything disposable be extra heavy-duty? I can see actual glasses through the open cupboard door. Why didn’t he simply use the glasses he owns instead of plastic? There’s even a dishwasher! This lazy extravagance used to infuriate me when we lived together. That American boy thing, seeing the world as a place opulent with things that are his to use up and not even recycle—almost as if there’s virtue in it, like being thrifty never occurred to him because he’s so wealthily innocent. He would say “Relax, honey!” wide-eyed, like he really had no idea why I would bruise his easy, happy way of being in the world. There’s always been enough of everything for him. I can still sense that line from ten feet away—where his attention and fondness for me ran out in favor of “being reasonable,” of there being limits to what I could ask, how weird I could be, how much I could need from him.

It’s so hard to watch the person you love be in pain. It’s a natural impulse to want to fix it, and not being able to is uncomfortable. Remaining in that state of discomfort over time is even harder. Being in a relationship with someone in chronic pain is like a chronic pain condition in and of itself.

At times, it strikes me as a sort of fair deal that I let go of Kjetil’s seemingly boundless acceptance of me and my limitations to end up with this: a fairly kind, normal man, whose heart held limited portions of everything when it came to me. Someone who, in the end, needed me to be different from who I am. It was a natural result, in a way. When Nick and I met, I was so concerned with my own privacy and an idea of how to be an adult New Yorker—keep your secrets and your pain to yourself. I talked to some of my friends about my health, but took enormous comfort in how untroubled I could appear with Nick and others. I was caught up in his burly, cheerful ways, his manner of turning everything into a joke. His handsome largeness and rude health seemed to come from a more solid, brighter, easier world than I did. I wanted in—badly.

In time though, that lighter world came to feel how certain American buildings feel to a European: an imitation curiously lacking in detail, everything a little too large. I came to see that our lives are not the same, aren’t even similar. Things are different for a tall, handsome, healthy man. All the ties that bound us were dissolvable—but one.

Before I leave, Nick and I patch things up, more or less.

I call out for Ella, but she doesn’t come and I go into the living room to say goodbye. She’s on the floor, absorbed in playing with her bunny and a doll I haven’t seen before. My body needs hers. All I want is to lift her up and breathe in the scent of her, but I resist, knowing it will only make my departure more difficult. I settle for bending down and kissing her hair.

The mixture of heartbreak and relief I feel when I leave …

I walk outside and the cold air feels so good. New York City is enormous, dark, and empty around me. The city noise echoing down the blocks and up the walls into the falling dusk. Inside Nick’s apartment, the two of them play and cuddle and hum and laugh, those warm bodies that I know so well. And I’m heading elsewhere, alone.

I WAS QUITE old before I first realized people say hurtful things to me because they care and that it’s difficult for them to see me in pain. Since it hurts to face the situation head-on, it’s tempting for them to believe I’m at fault rather than accept that often, when it comes to my health, the situation sucks no matter what I do. The pain is here; a certain damage has been done and cannot be undone. People sometimes prefer to believe that I’m failing to follow their advice and making mistakes they can judge me for, rather than accepting that I’m suffering. This shields them from the full weight of being present and offering support, even when they can’t fix anything. I feel as if they’re telling me I’m somehow wrong and therefore don’t have a right to suffer, or to talk about it, maybe even to exist. Maybe their actual message is: Please stop. I can’t stand my part in this. I can’t stand to witness the relentlessness of your pain.

The further out on the fringes you are, the further from regular people’s lives, the more you are blamed for your troubles. You’d think that if things get very, very bad, there would be support—allowances and understanding and love like you’ve always wanted. But it’s not true. When things get very bad, people often pull away. They and their reassuring friends have no problem finding sensible reasons for detaching themselves.

When it came to my parents, I suppose they believed it was necessary to keep me striving no matter what. The situation was not hopeless, because my mother could always produce some way that I should have known better or could have acted better to avoid getting sick. There was no need to panic, because the next time it would be different. Pretending my health was in my power and not so bad anyway may have been necessary for our survival, but it was still less than ideal for the most vulnerable party—me.

As a parent, even one who hasn’t been severely tested yet, I can see that the opportunities to make mistakes are staggering.

THE TIME BEFORE I left Norway is a vaguely remembered miserable fog. Many women have similar stories, and it’s not as special to me as I thought back then. Still, my experiences as a constantly sick child prepared me in the worst possible way for the situation. Thinking nothing could be done anyway, I went with my basic programming and ignored the symptoms until my endometriosis was a hideous stage-four mess that had taken over my pelvis and abdomen and left me twisted with pain. Even though I had been brushed off by doctors many times when I had brought up my symptoms, even though I’d called and called to try to move up appointments and surgery dates, it felt as if there was something ugly in not having done more to protect myself—in clearly thinking it was okay—normal—for me to be in such pain. It felt disgusting, like I had done it to myself. I’d acted stupidly on instinct, like an animal, as if I was trying to hide and die instead of getting treatment and owning my life, the limited way it was available. I’d been trying so hard to act as if I was normal that I allowed the tiny space that was actually mine, all 110 pounds of human flesh, to be ruined.

Occasionally, Kjetil and I would exchange some desperately hopeful words about things getting better eventually—but my real path to survival, which was getting the fuck out of there, was going to squeeze him out of my life. During one of many dark nights, Kjetil and I stood on each side of the kitchen table under fluorescent lights, with my stomach on display between us because it hurt too much to have even the lightest of fabrics covering it. The second I got in the door, I had to pull down the soft waistband of the yoga pants I was wearing below my hip bones, so they wouldn’t pain me as much. But it was the coldest winter in years and there was no way to solve it; I was always cold and in pain.

My stomach stuck out like I was pregnant, although they told me I could probably kiss ever being pregnant goodbye. I was sobbing, as usual, my arms clutching each other over my stomach, and it wasn’t some theoretical question of what I might’ve been doing to him: we were both choking on the despair filling our apartment. I couldn’t tell you how the nights ended up like this, they just did. There would be a flare of frantic rage and later we would hold on to each other desperately. I’d drug myself to get a few hours of fitful sleep and wake up the minute the drugs ran out. I was trying, like any patient in desperate need, to take only what was given and not demand more. I never got let off easily. I couldn’t grit my teeth and get past this, I couldn’t change it. My exposure made me furious.

I worked myself into a froth listing everything that was horrible until I cried. I said things like: “Everything is ruined. They just Scotch-taped me together to hobble along until I die. All I’ve ever fucking done is behave and now it’s too late to do anything else, I can’t have a normal life and I can’t go to New York either, I can’t do anything, I can’t have anything.”

He sighed. “It’ll be okay.”

“It will not be okay! It will so thoroughly, profoundly not be okay. And you know it, you just want me to shut up about it. You might as well just tell me to shut up.”

“I don’t want you to shut up.”

“You do, look at you! You’re sick of me.”

He was upset, too, but he could always keep his voice calm.

“Of course, I’m sick of the situation, but I’m listening to you. I just don’t see what good will come of dwelling on everything that’s negative.”

“Well, what should I be dwelling on then? Am I supposed to just sit inside this apartment and puke and take painkillers until I die? I should just kill myself.”

“I get it, okay? But I’m on your side! We’re in this together.”

But he looked so exhausted. What was he really thinking? His crushed eyes, his frown. His tears that came so easily, like it never occurred to him that something bad could come of showing vulnerability.

I sobbed. “But you can leave if you want to, and you can sleep through the night, and people leave your fucking body cavities alone, and you’re not in pain every second of every fucking day! So don’t tell me that we’re in this together.” I was both testing him and pushing him away, but even now, there is no insight I’ve gained that would have changed it.

When I left, I figured Kjetil would date a tall lawyer or economist with earning power and a strong, fertile body and a happy family to match his. I pictured his life without me as a TV commercial where people throw Frisbees, host pretty dinner parties, and enjoy tidy, able lives with no trouble, ever. I felt like it was a favor to him that I excised myself from his life—I was heavier than I had any right to be, toxic like mold. This thought brought anger, too, it was a matted, dirty mess. I felt I had no choice.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I have my headphones on while doing the dishes and a young woman on the Norwegian public radio podcast refers to oral sex as “the figure skating of the sex Olympics.” She has a loud, endearing laugh and leads a regular feature about sex, talking with ease about specific sexual how-to’s in a way that would never air in the US. I would have died of embarrassment to hear it when I was in the program’s intended age range for listeners.

I was a teenage figure skater. Maybe because she isn’t the flawless apparition of an Olympic athlete on TV—just a young, Norwegian voice in my ears—the notion of skating sticks in my head. The American skaters always look so put-together, their makeup perfect. I love to watch them, but I have much more tender feelings towards the Eastern European girls, who sometimes have bad teeth, or wear a slightly off shade of concealer, or too-bright hair clips that could’ve easily been hidden if anyone had thought to.

I check where I think my old skates might be, on the top shelf in the back of the hallway closet. I have some energy, so when they happen to be right there, I put a coat on, shove the skates in a Paris Review tote bag, and head out the door.

I find myself in a seat in the nearly empty subway car rattling towards the skating rink only twenty minutes after the thought even occurred to me. It’s late, and I haven’t even checked if the rink is still open. All the way there I try to persuade myself that it’s no big deal, just because I haven’t skated at all in ten years, it doesn’t matter, I don’t have anything better to do with my Ella-less night. I listen to music and feel fairly relaxed, but when I get off the subway and start walking over to the rink—four long, deserted blocks—there is no cool left. I hurry and pray for the universe to give me a break, just this once—please, please let nothing get between me and the ice.

I think of all those times when I was a kid, waiting for the bus, then walking all the way around the little lake and up all those hills to the rink, only to find it closed—why did that happen so often? I used to call the rink to try and make sure it was open, but you couldn’t be sure it was closed just because no one picked up. It was pre-internet. The disappointment was so harsh that I can still feel it.

Of course, when I get to the rink, it is closed. I’ve never been inside before, but instead of searching for the public entrance, I walk through the open industrial-looking door by a pile of rink-snow. I’m free to walk all the way up to the boards, breathing in the clean, slightly chemical ice, but there’s no one here. Why did I leave so late? I don’t even know why I brought the skates from Norway, spent that valuable suitcase weight years ago that I could have otherwise spent on kaviar tubes, Jordan toothbrushes, and tins of Stabburet mackerel in tomato sauce.

I lean against the boards and feel tears prick my eyes.

Just then, a bald Asian man in his sixties wearing work clothes comes through the door of what looks to be a changing room. I brace myself to be told to vacate the premises. Instead, he takes one look at my face and takes pity on me.

“You really, really want to skate, huh? You know, we’re closed.”

He pauses for effect.

“What the hell, I can give you twenty minutes.”

“Really?”

“I have to finish up in there anyway,” he says, gesturing to the changing room. “Twenty-five minutes at the most. Don’t make me regret it.”

He smiles when he sees I have tears in my eyes. I thank him profusely, but he just waves it off before disappearing into a back room. Sometimes, New York is a miraculously generous city.

I hurry to put my stuff on the bench and shrug off my coat, kicking off my boots at the same time. I insert my feet into the reassuring, stiff, padded leather of my skates that my parents spent so much money on when I was thirteen, bought with space to grow into. I lace them up tightly, my hands shaking. My arms remember perfectly how to unsheathe the blades from their plastic protectors in a single movement.

I put my earbuds in, my gloves on, and then I carefully step out of the gate on to the ice. Ah … The ice is rough, so I keep an eye on it for treacherous grooves. I can’t risk a fall. I carefully glide for a few strokes, listen to the soft crr crr of the incisions. The joy is immediate. This!