Summer Song II
by ANNA REESER
Liz Asch, Touch, ink and graphite on paper, 22 x 30 inches, 2015. Art photographed by Anna Campbell. Courtesy of the artist.
Summer SonG II
ANNA REESER| MAY 2023 | Issue 23
Part II of IV
begin the series here
The next two weeks of pregnancy are gulped into memory and preserved whole, images my body would not forget. Here’s Aaron, holding a bowl of plain Cheerios in bed next to me, handing them over one by one. Nausea so strong I just lie there existing. Aaron buys me a neck pillow for reading in bed; I name it Aidan. I’m naming everything I can see. A hummingbird, Esme. A squirrel, Noah. Round feelings. The warm suddenness of pee. Full leaves on the trees. Knowing the word “cotyledon” for some reason, crouching in a garden bed to see them. Aaron following instructions on a packet of lupine seeds, scarring them with sandpaper, dropping them in water to germinate. Taking photos of me. Playing Nirvana’s In Utero from his phone, right at the curve of my hip. A joke, but not a joke at all.
In the shed-studio with a pencil and a pad of paper, I draw compositions for new prints. Manic, fluttering rush of desire to make images. I draw shoulders, feet, ears. I love the shape of my nose now. My hands. I select large lino blocks, eighteen inches across. I press my palms against their cool surfaces. In the shower, I watch water run over my ribs, my stomach, my thighs. I think about lullabies, what songs I know by heart. I try an earnest “Hey Jude.” My voice falters, skips notes. These are muscles I’ve never used. I mumble and whisper my way through, against the rhythm of the water. A wild, gigantic thought: I hope my baby will be able to sing.
One night, when the sky darkens, I can’t remember what my mother smells like. I am so small. I was so recently reading a middle-grade novel, stretched on my belly on the oatmeal carpet of my youth. I stop crying. I stand before the mirror in an oversized shirt, staring at my waist, and I think I see a roundness there, and the ripple of pleasure seems to come from outside, from a collective place, but I feel it all the same.
***
I was nervous the whole day before the eight-week ultrasound, a feeling like bubbles rising in seltzer. Would the doctor print a picture of the embryo, and would I attach it to the fridge or carry it in my purse? After dinner, there were hours of daylight, so I walked out to the studio. The grass had grown long, frantic with clover.
I transferred a drawing to a lino block with carbon paper. The image was an ear, filling the field of the block, curved with shadows, quiet rooms. I was already behind on my editions. I traced hard over each line, adding up the time I had left. In a way, the pressure excited me. The baby was due in the middle of winter, and the show’s deadline would force me to produce as much work as possible. I pressed my pencil to the translucent carbon sheet, peeled the sheet up halfway to see that the line had transferred. Strong, clean. In the fall, seven months pregnant, I would stand with the prints in slim metal frames, wearing a retro button-down, resting my hand on the belly, all forward motion.
I wanted to start carving. Buzz in my fingertips, anticipating the slice of the gouge blade into the linoleum, the slate-blue strips of material curling away. I would mix thick ink until it hissed, roll a thin layer onto the block with a brayer. I would press a sheet of paper down and rub in circles with the baren, with the wooden spoon—firm, tender, anticipating the print.
***
The ultrasound burrows into memory like an old smell I can’t name. What is the smell of fullness in the throat? Or cereal left in milk too long, the O’s blurry at the edges? The walls of the clinic are papered with salmon-colored florals. I am aware of our dumb outfits—Aaron in a Sex Pistols shirt, me in a thrifted gingham sundress.
A nurse calls, “Catherine?”
We are led cheerfully into a dark room. The paper on the examination bench crunches under my hips. Lighthearted warning about the cold gel on the wand, and I feel it, dull and freezing. I watch a projected image with gray shapes. The wand presses my skin, searching. The image shifts—a grainy texture like pavement. Time slows, gets heavy, and I become aware of the bigness of this, the first glimpse of the future. Nina said my art is going to change. When? Is it now? Is the change bad or good? Aren’t we supposed to hear a sound? I hear Aaron breathing in and in and in.
We learn that the cells inside me stopped growing at seven weeks. That it looks like, as the ultrasound technician says, debris.
I swallow it down. Strewn rocks, dandelions, burnt ends of leaves. The doctor—young, with a round face—comes in to confirm. She says there is no heartbeat, and I will have a heavy period within two weeks. She tells us it is likely a genetic defect, nothing we could have caused or prevented. Her voice is tightly modulated, rehearsed. She says I can have the pregnancy surgically removed immediately, though some people find the natural way brings closure. Aaron is silent, staring at his hands. The doctor’s eyes are soft, but hurried underneath, flickering to other points in the room. She turns off the projector. The image of my body disappears and transfers to my mind. It looks like a long night in a moonlit room, too hot to move or sleep.
***
When we got home, the grass looked patchy and yellowed, the clover withering. The blue tarp hung over the studio and the drawings there, all those lines leading back to themselves. Aaron followed at a distance. I was afraid to hug him, afraid of what it would make me feel. I told him I wanted to go somewhere flat with an empty sky. We’d both taken the afternoon off work; it was barely lunchtime.
He remembered shooting a few rolls of film in Eastern Oregon, out near Lakeview. Hot, weird, like the moon or something. I liked the sound of it. I wanted to go. His brow furrowed. I could tell he was afraid to put the question into words.
“I’m not scared of blood,” I said, though in the dark of my belly, I was. Now that I knew what would happen, it seemed possible it could happen at any second. I did not want it to happen in the house. Not in the yard or the studio or the spare room. “We’ll bring a bunch of towels.”
He nodded silently, and we loaded a pile of beach towels into the car.
***
My first years dating Aaron are preserved in still photographs, held in a cardboard box. Me laughing in the blue shadow of a hat. Me on a beach on the Sound, dripping with summer—small, ecstatic. I feel I can perceive the world through his eyes, and so we understand each other without speaking. Life unfolds like sex—moves through apartments and day jobs and workspaces, nights and weekends and golden hour and dawn, just a nudge on the hip, turn over, a hand on the arm, faster. In my linocuts, lines soften with early love, take on the quality of light. Nobody tells us it won’t always be like this, that someday there will be words we have to say and can’t. Nobody tells us what it feels like to see the other holding back tears, clenching nails into their palm to feel it hurt. We get away with everything.
Anna Reeser’s short fiction is published in The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Masters Review, Fourteen Hills, and CutBank. She has lived throughout the West Coast and is now based in her hometown of Ojai, California. She recently completed a story collection and is working on a novel.
Liz Asch is an author, artist, and acupuncturist based in Portland, Oregon. Her book, Your Salt on My Lips (Cleis Press, 2021), is an ode to eros in queer bodies of the global majority. Her podcast, Body Land Metaphor Medicine, is a free archive of somatic visualizations. Her stop-motion animation film, The Love Seat, played in LGBT film festivals in the US and Canada. Liz holds a BA from Vassar, a Masters in Chinese Medicine, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Eastern Oregon University. Liz has published essays, poems, interviews, stories, book reviews, and artwork in a variety of journals and anthologies, earning her a Pushcart nomination, a RACC grant, and several essay prizes. Liz teaches embodied surrealism and salutary storytelling, with an emphasis on earth activism, creative expression, and public health.