The Summer Without Men

Boris had been my husband, but he had also been my interlocutor. We taught each other and, without him, I had no one to dance with anymore. I wrote to poet friends, but most of them were locked into the poetry world as much as most of Boris’s colleagues had been neuro shut-ins. This Nobody fellow was a leaper and a twister. He hopped from Leibniz’s Monadology to Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen to Wallace Stevens almost without taking a breath and, despite his loopiness, I found myself entertained and wrote back, coming at him with counterthoughts and new spiraling arguments. He was an adamant anti-materialist, that much I gathered. He spat on physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, touting a post-Newtonian world that had left substance in the dust. An intellectual omnivore who seemed to have pressed himself to the limits of his own whirling brain, he wasn’t well, but he was fun. When I wrote to him, I always saw a picture of Leonard. Most of us need an image, after all, a someone to see, and that was how I gave Mr. Nobody a face.
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    That night I dreamed I woke up in the bedroom with the Buddha on the dresser where I slept. I climbed out of bed, and although the light was dim, I noticed that the walls were wet and glistening. I reached out, touched the damp surface with my fingers, put them to my mouth, and tasted blood. Then, from the next room, I heard a child screaming. I rushed through the door, saw a bundle of white rags on the floor, and began pulling at them to unravel the cloth and uncover the child, but all I found were more and more wrappings. I woke up, breathing hard. I woke up in the room where the dream had begun, but the story did not stop. I heard screaming. Was I still asleep? No. With a racing heart, I understood that the sound was coming from next door. Good Go whihought, Pete. I threw on a robe and flew across the yard. Without knocking or ringing the bell, I ran into the house.
    There was a wigless Flora, brown curls exposed, prostrate on the living room floor, shrieking. Her small face was purple with rage and her burning cheeks streamed with tears and snot as she kicked a chair with her heels and slammed her fists into the floor. Simon was emitting a series of desperate gasping wails from the bedroom upstairs and before me was Ashley. Standing only a foot or so away from Flora, she looked down at the child with blank, dead eyes, and I saw her mouth twitch once. When she understood someone had come in and, in the same moment, recognized me, I watched her expression change instantly to one of concern and helplessness. I swooped down on Flora, picked her up in my arms, and pressed her close to me. The fit didn’t end, but I started talking. “It’s Mia, sweetheart, Mia. What’s the matter?” That was when I realized she was screaming, “I want my air! Air!”
    “Where’s her wig?”
    Ashley looked at me. “I threw it away. It was gross.”
    “Get it this instant!” I growled at her.
    Flora stopped writhing the minute her “air” was restored, and with the sniffing child in my arms I mounted the steps to the bedroom to rescue Simon. Telling Flora I had to put her down in order to retrieve Simon, I instructed her to hug my leg. The baby’s little body was convulsing with sobs. I picked him up and began rocking him until he grew calmer. The three of us, now one three-headed body, lumbered slowly down the stairs into the living room.
    The person I had first seen when I arrived had vanished. In her place was the Ashley I knew from class, a person who was relieved I had come, a person who had been overwhelmed, a person who hadn’t known what to do when Flora had smeared peanut butter in her wig, a person who had wanted to pick up Simon but was afraid to leave Flora. It all made perfect sense. Weren’t Lola and Pete dunderheads for leaving two children under four with a thirteen-year-old? I did not argue with her. I told her I understood. What was I to say? When I came in, I saw something in you that shocked me? I gleaned it from your eyes, your mouth? These insights do not count in social discourse; they may be true, but articulating them sounds insane. After I had settled the three of us onto the sofa, I asked Ashley to get me a bottle for Simon and sent her home.
    The children were both exhausted. Simon collapsed after his food, his tiny curled hand pressed into my collarbone. Flora found a clinging spot a little lower on my body and