What Is Is

I knew a woman once who killed butterflies to turn them into jewelry. She kept a sepiatoned photo in her wallet - her seven year old self smiling with a cobalt butterfly strung up around her neck. There is a pomegranate tree behind her.

The trick, she said, was to hold the butterfly like a closed book in a pair of rubberhandled pliers. They kept you safe from the frying jolt as you pushed the wiggling legs into the electrical socket. A thin plume of smoke, a stillness, a piece of thread, a new necklace.

I meet G for the first time in a Macy’s Department Store. His hair is smooth and shiny. He wears polished cufflinks and smells like a barber shop. I tell him the story of the butterfly necklace while I sell him a delicate string of pearls.

The next day, at the top of my shift, a soft velvet box is waiting in my cubby. Inside, a white butterfly wing, mother-of-pearl and gold. Underneath, a phone number.

***

In the cafe near the ocean, G pours condensed milk into my coffee and tells me about whales with tongues so big they could hold school buses, and hearts the size of Volkswagen Beetles.

My heart is as big as that, I argue.

He pours more of the thick, sweet milk and tells me the butterfly wing on my jacket looks very becoming - like he comes from the fifties. And that’s what he feels like - like he escaped from an Audrey Hepburn film and only exists in this cafe, where he fixes me sweet coffee and pushes the bangs off my forehead and calls me darling girl, darling girl.

The whale could swallow all this up, I say, the cafe and the funny waiter and you and your cufflinks. It’s big enough to swallow everything up, like God taking an aspirin.

I don’t think it could swallow you, he says softly.

I’d have to want to be swallowed.

***

In the dark cataloguing my body: the brittleness of my shoulder blades, the swollen-pink look of my upper lip in the mornings. The concavity below my rib cage where my fingers rest, like spiders.

All things rush in to touch me at once - the succulent leaf that fell from the pot and the lipstick kiss on the rim of the cup, the sound of the leaves turning yellow and the wrinkled oily film of a deserted fountain. The air hangs perfectly still and the world is behind glass or else at the bottom of an algaed lake or else, or else. Fragmented realities peel away from my body like the dewy skin of an orange. I am sticky with living. My hands are so tender on the surface tension of my life.

***

I wear the black dress with the pearl buttons. G tells me I look funeralesque, and it sounds like a compliment in the musical notes of his careful, unidentifiable accent.

We take an unheated train but I relax my muscles one by one, refusing to shiver in front of him. The breath of the slumbering man next to me rises in wispy puffs - his jacket smells like onions and sweat.

G looks at the man disapprovingly as his head nods closer to his chest, and he asks me to stand in the protective circle of his arms instead, but I won’t. I breathe in the stranger’s fumes and the thought comes to me, I have done nothing and so in a sense I have been nothing.

At the party the men all wear tweed jackets with suede elbow patches and the room smells like shoe polish. There is a pillow with a neat purple fringe on the couch. G talks to a colleague about Rilke while I hook and unhook my fingers into the loops of purple thread, mussing up the pillow and the folds of my dress with my sweaty fidgeting. G puts a hand over mine without looking and quiets my fingers with a crushing squeeze. I slip my hands under my thighs, listening about Rilke but mostly feeling the velvety fabric of the couch beneath my palms.

A woman with a sequined dress and a glass of whiskey sits next to me, thigh to thigh, and says How is it you pronounce your name again?

Later, on the train home, I lean my booze-soaked head against the window and ask the kind old woman next to me, Did you know about Rilke?

G stares at me, then turns away. I shiver.

***

Be this: big blue reel of a whale to hold him in your mouth - roll him on the tongue like a smooth pebble - dark damp of private cave.

This is love?

He says - hold my hand. He says - come to the water. Melt like sand to sift through for bright, awful things.

Is this me?

Instead be this: be bundle of secret places. Curtain the world with your teeth - smooth pinkness of belly muffling sound - and swallow.

***

G likes for me to stay laid out on the bed after sex, like a painting. He moves my arms and legs into new positions - a foot tilted just this way, a hand resting half-tangled in a sprawl of my hair.

What a darling girl, he says, soft like a small furred thing.

It is in moments like these that I learn my own body, with G trailing his tongue down my calf or brushing his warm fingers along the damp underside of my breast.

My touch is bigger than yours, I tell him one afternoon, with the sun creeping in around the seams of the shut blinds.

***

The universe takes its pleasure in the curve at the base of my spine. A damp wind caresses my wrists as somewhere, a long-nailed woman speaks to God at the kitchen sink. ‘I want more than anything’ - she tells Him.

She presses a thumbnail between her teeth. Her tongue darts to fill the bitter hollow of the acrylic and the universe crumples hard into the sweat of my neck. I am capsizing into the hot breath of the moment - the sheets straight-jacket into a second skin. A star explodes in through the open window as I roll the slumbering particles of the universe off my body, desperate for a moment to lick myself clean.

***

G surprises me with an apartment of my own - an airy place with old window shutters and a lemon-wax smell. From a certain corner of the living room you can look out the window at the slaggish water - a frigid, winter ocean. Three blocks away is the old cafe with the condensed milk.

G stays most nights, but not every night - and he says I should use the alone time to nurture my creative spirit, but all I want is to strip down to the skin and walk through all the rooms I am pretending to own. When I feel hungry I sit on the floor and gorge myself on the plums G left on the fine white dining table.

One evening we are reading and I point out the ladybug on the ceiling. G tries to bring her down but I won’t let him.

She is a part of this place, I say.

I find her in a different spot every day for weeks, and I call her Constance.

Constance, how are you today?

Constance, have you had anything to eat?

Constance, do you like living here with me?

One morning I look for Constance and realize she is gone. I left the windows open overnight, and I do not resent her wanderlust.

But who will watch me dream now?

***

***

One night I fall asleep on the R train and wake with my cheek pressed against the smooth bump between two seats. The orange plastic cradles my hips, almost soft in that way that some spaces respond softly to the needs of a tired body. Hair sticks to my lips and temples.

The train is empty except for one small man who stares at me. He stares and stares, so I stare back. The man pulls back his scabbed lips to show his teeth—yellow-green in the flickering light and three of them missing.

I am at the root of my unbecoming, I say to him, and he laughs. Deep in the underground we both shout our laughter, until I am belly-up on the bench and pressing my own cold hands to my burning cheeks.

***

I am made of dental floss. Puce-colored and flavored like raspberries - crisscrossing, loosely woven. God sits next to me on the dirty bus and brutally fingers the strings until I shout Can’t you see the tension? The impending snap? But he looks through me and at the skyline - so I let God pluck me tight and use me to pick his teeth clean, and I thank him for the honor.

***

G finds the pregnancy test in the bathroom wastebasket. He sits me on one end of the leather couch and paces back and forth, back and forth beneath the imitation Van Gogh. His skin is green-tinged under the living room light.

Five hundred dollars, I say.

What?

Five hundred will cover it just fine.

G collapses onto the couch beside me. I can smell the relief in his sweat. He presses his lips to my neck and I feel the words before I hear them--

Darling, darling girl.

***

If I could only grasp the roots above me--feel the knuckle bones of the earth pull taught as I yank myself out of the soil. A stunted stem. What then? Do I expect the earth to help me rise? To dust I don’t intend to return. I intend to fill my lungs with open sky. I intend to be a stalk too thick to reap, too coarse to be milled down into fine white flour. Roots, roots, let me up! I intend to be.

***

The clinic is too bright and the women pulled behind the curtain are shaking. A nurse with a slicked ponytail calls my name. The fear in my breath is sour and alive as she leads me to the bed, the lights.

You got someone here to take you home, baby?

Somewhere underneath the creeping sedatives I know that G is waiting in the car with flowers.

Flowers are only dead things, I tell the nurse, but she isn’t listening. She is busy preparing the needles and the speculum.

***

I don’t know what to pray for anymore except to be painted gold and allowed to melt into a better shape. Something solid for my mother to wear around her finger, point to and say ‘here is the price paid.’ Or else I’d like to be the clicking sound of cornflower roots growing, the color of water, the taste of a pine needle, a single fiber of silk, a broken-open seed--in essence, something at home in the dirt.

***

***

I am held down by the white sheets and the one thing I want is to see the bird’s nest outside my mother’s bay window. See the baby birds with the bulbous tongues and raw pink gullets hunkered sweet among the twigs and pine needles. The nest is still there, a year later, but the pink babies are gone and the birds won’t come to the window anymore.

I’ve thought about hunting in the park for another family to love but the silence of the cicadas is unbearable. Besides, the town mowers have decimated my favorite mushroom, the one that grew round and tender until one day it fanned out strong for the purpose of my visit, as if to say - you deserve this pageant of growth. It has not grown back, and somehow all the promises made to me have been broken.

The years have brought change and how awful am I for wishing to be rooted in the earth, to be solid and unshakable and static, to be one note held long and subliminal just underneath a fugue of cicadas, to exist without movement or need.

***

One morning a woman holding a small boy knocks on my door. I stare at her through the peephole, taking in the smooth, reddish hair and the delicate string of pearls roped around her neck. Her baby chews on his round fist. I know who she must be - who she is - and before she can knock again, I open the door.

We look at each other. My bathrobe is falling open at the neck.

You’re young, she says, and she barges past into the living room.

I let her do a silent lap around the apartment. She sees the fine white dining table, the china in the kitchen, the crystal bottles of perfume in the bathroom. Her little boy beats his fist against her chest until she sits him on the couch and walks toward the door.

I need a smoke.

The boy gazes absentmindedly at me, at the dirty mug on the coffee table, at the softcolored paintings on the walls. His hair is thick and black, like G’s, but curly. I lean over him to stroke it, and he pulls his fist out of his mouth long enough to smile, showing off the pale pink gums and his one sprouting tooth. His hair feels like a flower petal.

You have no right to touch him.

She is back in the doorway, smelling like mentholated cigarettes and Chanel.

I want to tell her that the pearls around her neck once slipped through my fingers into G’s. That the marks of my hands are all over her life. That the baby is as good as mine. But why would I? Who would I be wounding but myself?

Nothing to say, I guess, she spits. Well - I hope you know you aren’t the first. Or the only.

She takes up her baby and leans in close to me. I can smell the milk on his breath. One hooked, manicured finger comes to rest against my chin, almost tender.

I pity you, she says - and they walk away.

***

***

I let a man go ahead of me on the escalator today.

It is the quiet part of the afternoon. G and I are lying naked in the bed, a china bowl of raspberries between us. He is watching a droplet of pink juice trail down the soft underside of my arm. He isn’t listening.

What?

I let a man go ahead of me, I repeat. He was waiting for a space to break into the line. I stopped and extended my arm, let him in ahead of me.

G is tracing the line of raspberry juice with his finger. He should have let you go ahead.

I felt like a gentleman, I say.

You shouldn’t have to - you’re a lady.

I don’t bother to explain to him that the careless wave of my arm gave me power. That I stopped a long line of angry commuters because I felt like it. That the man ducked his head, stooped his shoulders, scurried ahead of me like a small, furred, terrified thing. That I stood on the stair behind him, above him - enjoying his gratitude.

I can only laugh - soft at first and then hard, callous, like a man or an animal. G looks frightened, asks me what is so funny.

I’m leaving you.

***

Early morning on the bus there is a small woman with a mess of frizzy, copper hair. Her hands quiver as she asks the driver how much and digs in her wallet for change. She is holding up the line.

I spend the whole ride looking at her calves under their creamy nude stockings, and sneaking glances at the way her thin fingers peek in and out of her sweater cuffs. I’d like to pull her onto my lap and taste her. I’d like to ask her what her life is like, where she works, what she dreams about at night when she is sweaty and flung carelessly across her bed.

Later, in the train station, an old woman sleeps as if dead across a bench. Her crusted mouth hangs open. She is barefoot, and one arm hangs off her makeshift bed, palm open and terrible. I am wild with something and I consider laying my hands on her face - cooling her the way my mother did when I was feverish.

I know I am somewhere between these two women, but I do not know where.

I climb my way out of the subway tunnel into the crowded morning. The sun rises behind pillars and domes, apartment blocks and stunted trees - and life is gorgeous, somehow.

***

Nicole Saldarriaga is "an unlimited person living in a limited world." She is currently a student in Columbia University’s MFA program and has been published twice in the Sarah Lawrence Review. At the moment she is living in Hoboken, NJ with her ferocious cat, Jelly Bean.