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Morgan’s mother called her into the bedroom. “I’m a beast,” her mother said. “How am I
ever supposed to take my clothes off again? These things never happened to my body when I had
you.” She held a narrow pair of jeans in front of her belly. “I keep these to remember. They’ll fit
again. They will.”
Morgan followed her mother’s gaze to the ceiling. A crack ran from the overhead light to
the corner, widening just slightly before it disappeared into the wallpaper. “Don’t get me
wrong,” she said, “I love you babies. But I don’t love this anymore. Who could.” She rolled her
neck until it released a pop. Sunk her chin towards her chest. “I can’t even say aloud the places I
have stretch marks.”
The house was very quiet; Morgan’s siblings were napping; their little hot breaths softly
clogging the rooms down the hall. Morgan’s mother balled up the jeans and shoved them into her
bedside drawer. “Do you know the last time I wore these.” Not a question. Her sentences were
punctuated with little snorts at the end or sometimes in the middle. A comma. An ellipsis.
Morgan nodded, though she didn’t know, and moved closer to the bed. “The day I found out I
was pregnant with you.” Her mother leaned closer, pulled her to sit down, and whispered, “They
are everywhere.” She gestured towards a part of Morgan’s body, then her own, a body part that
Morgan was uncomfortable acknowledging existed on her mother, or really, anyone.
Morgan was willing to assume at least partial blame. She had wished for a little brother,
just as she’d wished for braces, to know what it was like to wear a cast, to grow breasts, and all
of those things came true, too. But the wishing, she learned, was slick-sided and unpredictable.
The braces cut her lips. The cast, while available to be signed, generating sympathy, and blue,
her favorite color, had followed a badly broken arm bone, and now her right elbow had an ugly
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scar and a metal pin inside. Her breasts came in early and fast, and she had not just a little
brother, but two of them, and a sister, and soon another sibling would arrive.
She’d once known her mother as a different sort of presence: the scent of soap and sweat
above her then smaller body tucked into bed, a reliably eager face in the minivan window as she
exited the elementary school, a warm mound to nestle against on the weekends, while her father
made pancakes and hummed and whistled and occasionally even sang the words to a song that
Morgan now believed she must have been imagining.
But now, her mother was stretched out, pulled thin, and pushed inside of a thick-strapped
bra that held her breasts close to her body. When she released the clasp, they fell out like
undercooked eggs. She was pregnant for the fourth time, and she had been told to rest.
On a night some months ago after putting the twins to sleep, her mother slipped into the
room Morgan shared with her sister April. She knelt beside Morgan’s bed and closed her eyes.
April was a small face, shiny with snot, her body, wedged against their mother’s hip, was
indistinguishable from their mother’s in the half-dark. “Don’t you dare,” her mother said. “Don’t
you let me hear you’re behind the school with some boy. Look at where we are now. Behind the
school is how we got you.” Then she put a cool hand on Morgan’s forehead. She opened her
eyes, patted April’s back and said, “My babies.”
But there was a boy Morgan liked. It was impractical and perfect in a number of ways, all
of which Morgan listed in her spiral notebook (hair: shaggy, dark brown, just enough gel / taller
than me by a lot / in hs / maybe too old? / super nice voice / has girlfriend :( / freckles, just nose /
no sick face pubes / sooo hottt). She began the list on the tenth page so that the first page, and
therefore, the notebook as a whole, appeared empty.
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The boy would graduate from the high school before she entered in the fall, and he was
dating the babysitter who’d helped care for the twins and April, and to her horror, even Morgan,
herself, on the few occasions before her mother had become convinced that it was a waste of
money and begun to rely Morgan’s constant help with them. When Morgan saw the boy at the
grocery store where he worked, or on the embarrassing rare occasion that the babysitter was still
asked over, Morgan would look at her feet, sweat around her hairline, and crack her knuckles,
starting from the pinkies and working in. Even looking at the babysitter, she saw the boy and the
way the babysitter’s body held onto him. She imagined them together and spent whole
afternoons considering that it was possible that she, Morgan, could come up in their casual
conversation. She had seen them together once, intimately, in her own house. Dropped off late
after a soccer game when her mother and father were uncharacteristically out to dinner,
celebrating or perhaps, ending this last interim between pregnancies, she had seen them. Mashed
together on the couch was a mess of hair ——blond and dark brown——and limbs, she had seen
them. The TV was up a bit too loud——she’d noticed this first. Back pressed against the foyer
wall to hide the unwelcome sweat that was forming in familiar places along her spine, she slunk
toward the stairs. Her room. From the highest step, she paused to see what was going on below.
The babysitter tugged the boy’s hair and he lifted his face from hers, then she freed a strand of
her own long hair that had become tangled beneath them. Her tongue on his neck. His hand
pushin at her her shirt. Morgan saw the pale, taut skin of the babysitter’s torso. The babysitter
said, “Wait, the other one will be home any minute,” but let his hand keep moving over her. The
boy said something she couldn’t quite make out and the babysitter rushed her face back to his
and they resumed and Morgan ran to her room and shut the door fast, but without slamming.
Slipped to the floor thinking me, I am the other one, feeling both invisible and young and
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horribly elated that she had existed in that space between their mouths in that small moment
when their lips had parted.
The babysitter, Cammie, applied mascara to her top and bottom lashes. She drove a white
punchbuggy and drank mochas and wore blue velvet pants and tank tops, even in winter, and
whenever possible, but only for the briefest moments, Morgan would slip her own arms inside
Cammie’s winter coat to feel the cool turquoise silk of the lining against her skin.
At night Morgan wrote letters between the boyfriend and herself. She made up letters
between Cammie and the boyfriend. The letters between Morgan and the boyfriend were about
love and the way she felt when she considered the possibility that he could be thinking about her
at the same exact moment that she was thinking of him. Like what if they both looked up at the
sky and saw the same shooting star. Or looked at the kitchen clock at exactly 12:34. How he was
excited to see he come through the sliding doors at the grocery store, especially when she was
alone. Or perhaps it was possible that he wasn’t quite finished at Clearview High School this
year, not because he wasn’t smart, but because he wanted to be there with her.
Hi Alex! She wrote. ILY cos ur nicer 2 me thn ne1.
She’d memorized his all caps handwriting from his name tag at the grocery store where
he was always friendly, offering extra coupons if there were any around, saying Hi Morgan, Hi
Mrs. Clemmens, waving at the twins and April, but always, always, saying Hi Morgan, first.
Recently, with her mother nearing the end of the most recent pregnancy, Morgan had been
tasked with the shopping alone while her mother waited in the car. So when he wrote back, she
did it in his own hand. He answered immediately. He responded by repeating what she had said
to him, but sometimes adding his own twist. ILY COS UR NICER 2 ME THN NE1. Alex
suggested that he’d once he’d seen Morgan he’d only stayed with Cammie to be close to her
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since he knew their love was forbidden. To get to see her. Like that night at her house. How
badly he had wanted to come to her room, to knock and tell her how he felt. ALMOST! He said!
SOON! He said. UR THE ONLY 1. KISS THE CLOCK AT 11:11 I WILL 2.
Hi Alex! She wrote again.
I love you because you’re nicer to me than anyone ever has been or ever will be. She
wrote it out because in high school, in real letters, she thought, it would be expected that you said
exactly what you meant.
The letters between Morgan as the babysitter and Alex were about bodies——Morgan’s
but not Morgan’s, Morgan if she had been Cammie——and his. She wrote words like penis, then
scratched that out and wrote dick, then scratched that out and wrote thing. Would Cammie say
thing?
AI want to touch your penis dick thing when you come over to the Clemmens' on Friday
- C.
His thing and her thing. She imagined Alex lying very close to her and then maybe on top of her.
They would be moving and she couldn’t see when or how but they would have taken off their
clothes.
How? He would stand her up and pull her shirt over her head but his shirt would be off.
How: He would come to her house and climb through her window, throw a rock (small)
first to alert her that he was outside. She would open the window. There would be an convenient
ladder. Before she knew it, they would both be smiling and laughing together and murmuring to
each other while they were kissing, but she couldn’t write this to him. They might do more than
just kissing. It embarrassed her to think this way, and if written as herself, she didn’t want to read
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it, or acknowledge the thoughts. Instead she wrote: HI CAMMIE I WANT TO PUT MY HAND
UP YOUR SHIRT ON THE CLEMMENS' COUCH I WANT TO PUT MY MOUTH ON
YOUR MOUTH I AM GOING TO TOUCH YOUR BREAST TIT BOOB I AM GOING TO
PUT MY HANDS IN YOUR PANTS I AM GOING TO PUT MY FINGERS...she folded the
paper, covering her Alex words with a new white surface and slid it up, looking again and again.
Even if she mimicked Alex’s writing it was still her.
It was easier to write the letters about love.
She ripped the paper from her notebook and kept it in her pockets until late at night when
she unfolded it one last time to rip into tiny bits and flush in the toilet.
Morgan retrieved her mother’s jeans from the bedside drawer. She took them to the bathroom
and locked the door, then struggled to yank the stiff denim over her hips. It was as if they’d
never been washed. She stretched out on the cool tile floor and cinched the waistband together.
Her lower body looked lean and tight in the mirror, but above the waistband, her flesh puffed
out. When she unfastened the jeans, the button popped off and rolled under the counter. Putting
the button in a pocket and folding the jeans hem over waist, she arranged them into a tight packet
on the floor. She stretched the skin of her stomach to become a squinted eye and narrowed her
stare in the mirror to blur her vision, hoping her body would be better this way, easier to
reconcile.
The problem was: she’d never gone behind the school with a boy, but would she ever?
The boys had mostly left her alone once the other girls started getting boobs, but before that,
when she was in the only one in 4th and 5th grades wearing a cup-sized bra, they’d stare and
point at where they thought her nipples might be, making wide circles with their thumbs and
pointer fingers and sometimes tried to snap her bra straps. “Is your bra too tight?” They’d
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giggle——letting out these awful high-pitched, girlish sounds and drawing attention to
themselves and to Morgan.
The problem was: it felt embarrassing then, but if it happened now, she suspected she’d
feel differently. But how to go about getting that attention now? After the beginning of 7th grade,
when most girls had at least a bra to stuff, and some of the ones that weren’t stuffing would let
certain boys stick their hands under their shirts and down their pants——under their bra but
always always over their panties, they said, which was maybe or maybe not the truth, Morgan
faded into the background. Certain boys like Edward Mashburn, who Morgan barely knew, but
who fingers were rumored to have visited those places all the girls denied, were prone to
showing off. During CPR class, Edward Mashburn had, more than once, mounted his dummy
and humped it up and down, even though it was just a head and a torso. He still passed because
when it became time to press the dummy’s chest and breathe into its wide-open plastic mouth, he
demonstrated perfect technique.
The problem was: she’d inserted a finger inside herself and repulsed by the foreign
texture of her own interior had removed it quickly, sniffed it, and decided not to think about it or
try it again for a year. So far she’d gotten five days, tops.
The problem was: Alex would be gone from high school by the time Morgan got there
and Morgan wasn’t dumb, she wasn’t mental——she knew (except in those tiny euphoric
moments reading Alex’s love letters) that he wasn’t going to choose her, but thinking about him
filled her with a kind of opaque hope for living that started in her belly and moved outwards.
Often, as far as her fingers, so that they, too, felt light and fluttery (jubilant!) as she pressed them
against her chest where her heart mimicked (or was it the other way around) the feeling. She
closed her eyes. It was difficult to feel this way and stare at herself in the mirror. She stood on
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her tiptoes and pressed her hips against the hard Formica of the bathroom sink. She gritted her
teeth. Back and forth. A smile she couldn’t see. But the fluttering and the clenching and the
gripping of the corners of the sink counter and the saying of his name in her head (Alex Alex
Alex Alex) had a secondary effect. Afterwards, alone, in the locked bathroom, with this boy
miles away, Morgan would grow guilty and nervous, her unwanted sweating patterns
blossoming. She’d gone too far in her thoughts. And if he could hear her, oh God, what if he
could hear her! (Not that it was at all possible, though so often, she worried her thoughts were
transparent, and if anyone looked at her too long, her most awful feelings would simply be
known, spit out at her feet for picking and perusal).
The problem was: it was almost the same thing her mother had warned her against.
The problem was: if her mother’s teenage jeans didn’t fit her, hadn’t she’d already
missed out on some chance?
Morgan lifted up her shirt and pulled down the cup of her bra. She put her hand over her
breast in the mirror. Tit, she thought. Don’t blush. That’s what it is. She touched the skin around
her nipple and watched herself do it. Her hands looked different, removed from her body:
spidery and grown up. She moved a hand inside her underwear and turned sideways. In her
letters, she hadn’t much imagined the specifics of Alex’s body, the flesh and its arrangement
under his clothes, but instead the feelings his body might have or those that hers might have or
theirs together. A dick, she thought, cupping her fist in front. She moved one finger forward,
then another. The rearranged them. She made eye contact with her reflection and didn’t hear the
jingling of the knob, or sense her mother at the door. For a moment she stood, frozen before
covering up with a towel from the rack. She felt her mother scan her body. A stop at the breast
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freed from the white fabric of the bra, bisected by the seam into a distorted animal thing; a pause
near where her pubic hair darkened the front of her underwear and spread out just slightly
beneath; a sigh at way her hips bulged to join her waist and thighs; finally a blink at her bony
ankles and a nod at feet that had never fit in the right shoes since toddlerhood.
It was all wrong.
Morgan and her mother met again at eye level, and her mother said, “If you wanted to try
on the jeans, you could have just asked,” before snatching them from the floor. Morgan wrapped
the towel tightly around her body, pushing her knees together. Somehow the towels in her house
kept getting smaller and thinner at exactly the worst moments. At the doorway, her mother
paused. “You need to be better about washing your back,” she said.
Dressed, Morgan ventured out of the bathroom. It was inevitable that she’d have to leave
sometime, and she forced herself out while still annoyed by mother’s intrusion. In the recliner,
eyes half closed, with April at her feet repeating the words from the cartoon on TV, Morgan’s
mother rested. “I’m not sorry,” Morgan said. Her mother opened her eyes half squint and
nodded. April picked a loose thread in the carpet, holding the fiber up for Morgan’s approval.
“Morgreen,” she said.
“You have to respect people’s privacy. Their personal things. Personal space, Morgan. If
you’re so concerned with being grown-up all of a sudden. That’s what adults do.” Her mother
held the jeans in her lap.
At April’s birth, Morgan had been amazed by her sister’s fine slick hair that seemed as
though it was painted onto her scalp. Her mother invited her to sit close in the bed with them and
hummed softly and they all three fell asleep until the twins barged in, with their father, ready to
meet the baby and take them all home. Then, April, at home: crying, stinking, multiplying the
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annoyances that the twins already caused. She hated their diapers and their baths and wiping
their smooth, white asses.
Her mother, she suspected, had to hate it too. Back then, her mother had confided in her.
“Do you see what this has done to me? Do you get it. Do you know what happens when a baby is
born?”
“I do Mom.” Morgan said. “I do.” She’d wanted to help, had tried to hug her mother
by placing gentle arms on her shoulders and waiting for her to melt, an imitation of her father.
“You don’t know a thing,” her mother said. “You’re a child and with each one of you it
keeps getting worse. Don’t you see how it keeps getting worse?”
Morgan did.
“April, come here,” Morgan said. Her mother’s eyes flickered open again. April held out
the carpet fiber like a puppy treat. There were times when her sister was soft and quiet. A warm
nugget in her arms and Morgan loved her then. She imagined her mother must have felt this way
about all of them, might still feel this way. She envied April for still being small, the twins for
being one half of two, and the time whoever was burrowed inside her mother’s belly had alone in
there, as disgusted as she was of the outward effects.
April tried to climb into their mother’s lap, then settled again for hugging her legs. She
buried her face between her knees. Their mother rested a hand on her head. Why couldn’t she
join April on the floor? Wrap herself around their mother, too. Be accepted in and folded in with
them.
“Come on. Come with me.” Morgan grabbed at her sister’s arm. It slapped back to their
mother’s leg like a magnet.
“Well, did they fit at least?” Her mother said, patting April’s head.
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