You Just Got Here

by Brian Zimbler

Nora and I are overfull, walking home from brunch at Purple Gourd. Our daughter Myla is at school. Elliot is in his Ergo, zipped into my hoodie, right on top of my Eggs Benedict Cumberbatch. Before brunch, Elliot had a pediatrician appointment to check on his cauterized belly button. The doctor we saw was new and mean. 

“You didn’t remove this yet?” the doctor asked, taking off the Band-Aid, leaving thin red lines surrounding Elliot’s belly.

Nora opened her mouth slightly, then looked at me. 

I aw-shucksed, “We thought we should let it fall off in the bath, organic—”

“No. And see this, Mom,” the doctor continued, opening Elliot’s tiny palm and removing one of Nora’s long, curly hairs, “We can’t have this. He could wrap it around his finger. It’s a tourniquet waiting to happen.”

Nora and I both drank at brunch, unwilling to accept this new doctor’s suggestions of negligence given that we’ve kept our first kid alive for seven years. We’re still talking about it on the walk home, overheating from the mimosas. Nora pushes a damp curl behind her ear with her fingers. I suggest we walk on the shade side of the street.

“I should have said something to her,” Nora says as we cross.

“Like about her clearly traumatic childhood—”

“No, like—”

“—spent in a terrible tangle of her mother’s hair?”

“Shut up for a second. Sorry, but you’re not letting me—”

“You don’t need to apologize. It’s hot. I like—”

“I’ve been reading this book—”

“—assertive Nora. It’s a turn-on. You should tell me to shut up more.”

She stops walking and turns to me. Her eyes are dark and, for a brief second, I flinch like she might hit me. Crazy. I want it, though. I want to touch. I want to reach up and put my hands on her body somewhere soft, and pull her to me, but that would smush the baby. Elliot’s pacifier worries my breastbone. If I did touch her, would she recoil? Plus the shade side of the street—not helping. Passersby look more sinister in the shade. Even the hip new diner looks dead. Dead hamburgers. The Russian grocery across the street, the one that I joke sells salmonella, looks alive in the sunlight. I’ve always wanted to go in there.  

Nora starts walking again, a little bit ahead. “See what you do?” she says, “I was telling you about me. And now we’re talking about you.” 

I rush to catch up. “Well, technically, me coming on to you is about us. Sorry, tell me about this book.” 

Nora breathes out but keeps walking and doesn’t relax. Her body is a whole different body when she’s forgiven me versus when she hasn’t. I can tell by her throat: taut like an animal’s, vigilant. 

“It’s called Codependent No More and it’s teaching me how much I rely on other people’s feelings to tell me what I feel. Other people in general, but you in particular.”

She stops again and looks directly at me. What would her face look like if I were gone? 

“OK, so I won’t say how I felt about that stupid ass doctor. How did you feel about her?”

“I wanted to slap the shit out of her.”

“You should’ve. I would’ve had your back. I honestly think you should slap the shit out of more people, babe. More people in general but—”

“You in particular!” she says.

“Yes! Fuck me up!”

“Don’t tempt me!”

“Do it!” I lean my face over the baby. Elliot is in that warm, close sleep that no grown-up words can touch. 

We laugh. It’s so nice. When Nora laughs, her throat loosens, her shoulders lower, and the whole neighborhood flutters, like in a breeze. She looks down at her sneakers and kicks out at nothing.   

I love laughing with my wife because it’s something the baby’s not in on—in general Elliot’s in on everything.

“I have an amazing idea,” I stage-whisper, touching Nora on the elbow and guiding her under the awning of the new Thai restaurant—the awning somehow doubling the darkness—“Let’s stick up the corner bodega. Don’t look!”

She starts to laugh again. “You’re such a—”

“Like together. As a duo.”

I stick out my hip and make a gun pose. Nora rolls her eyes. 

“What about our kids?”

“You’re the one who doesn’t want to be codependent anymore. We’ll fuck up this bodega and we’ll leave Elliot as our calling card. We can prop him up against the cash register in his onesie! After his nap, of course. And then we’ll go fuck up the Whole Foods in Gowanus—that’s big loot—and we’ll leave Myla as our calling card. And then we’ll have a shitload of money and no kids and we can buy a chalet in the south of—”

“This is getting not funny to me. You can’t see my face?”

I can see her face, the tug-of-war happening while I speak: tight versus loose, guard versus giggle, frozen versus fluttering. I watch the part of her that loves me lose to the part that dislikes me. But I still want to win.  

“I was joking. Jesus.”

“Why are you a dick?”

“Inadequacy. And my childhood.”

“You need to work it out. We’re adjusting to a major life change. Maybe our energy is better spent facing all the crazy feelings than trying to escape them.” 

“And you’re saying armed robbery of a bodega might be a distancing mechanism?”

She cuffs me on the arm. We walk toward the bodega, and there he is, of course, Bodega Guy.

I don’t like him. I’m pretty sure he hates me too. When we first moved into the neighborhood, I tried to befriend him. I’m from a small town; I say hello to everybody. But whenever I said hi back then, Bodega Guy looked straight at me and said nothing, like a threat.

Bodega Guy tips back now on his milk crate, smoking a short cigarette and laughing for seemingly no reason. I’m pretty sure he lives in the basement of the house a few doors down from us. I think he’s Italian, one of those old-school fix-it guys. No wife, no children. Close-cropped white hair, T-shirt tucked into belted jeans, kinda fit but with a belly. Sometimes, this other white guy with a ZZ Top beard and house paint all over him hangs out at the bodega with Bodega Guy, but today he’s alone. He looks at us. Nora nudges me to keep walking. Once, out of nowhere, he gesticulated aggressively toward her (not quite a midair jerk off but not quite not) when she was sitting with Myla on our stoop. 

“What’s up,” I say to him, in that mildly hostile way I learned from my students. I’m a high school social worker. What’s up, like, let’s do this.  

Bodega Guy looks right through us. Nora speeds up. 

We did this professional development recently at my school, where we picked a student we felt particularly challenged by, and we became that student, tried to think and feel like them. When I was in character—I picked this kid De’sean, who never gets in real trouble but totally ignores me when I say anything to him in the hall—the facilitator asked me, as De’sean, to tell her what I thought of me. I took a moment, felt things in my body: I was young, cocky, I had a brilliant smile that kept people off me and the best handle in the school but I knew (as me) that De’sean’s older brother was the one that came in for his parent meetings and I felt that place, right in my chest, and I knew with perfect fucking clarity that I would never let anyone, ever—

“I know what you want,” I said, as De’sean.

“What do I want?” the facilitator said, as me.

“You want everything. You want fucking everything.”

“I just want to know who you are.”

I put my hands over the place on my chest.

“You want the pain so you can use it against me. To make me change.” “No I—”  

“You’re not my parent. Why are you even here? Why is he here?” I asked the room, about myself.

Now I turn and look over my shoulder quickly at Bodega Guy. Should I try it with my sworn enemy? To become him? He’s up off his crate and looking in our direction. I concentrate, feel my way through the judgment in my body to his body, and I become him. I stub out my cig. I feel the smoke in my lungs. I, as me, have never smoked anything. It’s fucking great! What’s the fuss? There’s a little breeze after all, I can feel it through this holey Metallica shirt. And lookee here, look at these two fucking presidential candidates walking right here. Please tell me who the fuck these rich idiots think they are. Go home. You think you own this joint? I grew up here. You people just got here, I’ve been here.

He has a point.

“Babe,” Nora says, “I think he’s following us.”

I look back again. He’s walking in our direction.

“He’s just walking. He’s allowed to walk.”

Elliot is heavy. One thing they don’t tell you about dad bod: They tell you about the knees, and the lower back, and of course the luggage-tummy—but they don’t tell you that, for each sperm you give out that makes it, that becomes a life sperm, you lose that exact amount of life inside.  

“Should we cross?” Nora asks.

“Nah. Not yet.” 

Nora takes my hand. 

Across the street, slathered in sunshine, Ditmas Middle, The Dit. Myla and Elliot will not go there. Before we moved into the neighborhood, when Myla was a newborn, my school—a specialized school only for kids who have at some point been held back—sent me to the Dit recruit. 

Nora and I pause under the long scaffold at 800 Cortelyou. I sneak a look back. Bodega Guy seems to stop too, about a hundred feet away, parking himself on the low brick wall that surrounds the apartment building. 

A school bell rings and a huge pack of middle schoolers are burped onto the sidewalk. The sun burnishes them, in just their shirtsleeves.  

I see Elliot, a baby-sized tumor on my front, pushing away from my chest, off from the shade side of the street, radiation releasing him to grow rapidly from newborn to middle school age. A side effect of this treatment he’s getting, as a second born, being that Nora and I actually do plan to put our money where our mouths are and let Elliot go to our neighborhood school. And perhaps this process, the one aging Elliot up, also burns off my stand-up comic ego, allowing me to grow down. In my mind, I follow my son across the street, both of us hitting middle school at the same time. 

Elliot joins a gaggle of the popular kids, slapping five, yelling. He keeps looking back at me though. He sees something in me. I’m standing by myself. The popular kids are sucky and mean but Elliot’s one of those people that can be popular and not suck. He’s just a nice kid.

I’m a nice kid too. I’m a nerd, but I’m a good and trusting kid. 

That’s all I really am.

My middle school son moves toward me. He’s wearing a cool, thin Whitesnake T-shirt.

“Hey,” he says, a little awkward.

I know he’s a good person. It’s his eyes, they’re grey and kind. We’re going to be friends, maybe best friends.

“Pussy,” he says, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose with the heel of his hand, hard, until they break against my forehead, a delta of blood and saltwater. 

I grow the hell up and cross back to Nora.

Nora is waiting for me under the scaffold. Nora is a private practice therapist for tweens. She gets me. 

“Where are you right now?” she says.

“Nor, what if you don’t rob that bodega with me and I rob it by myself and I get caught and they put me in solitary confinement? That will be a major life change. You and the kids probably won’t even visit me.”

She puts her arms around me and hugs Elliot—back to being an innocent babe—but also hugs me even though my hands hang at my sides. Elliot wiggles. 

“Let’s do force field,” she says.

I look over at Bodega Guy still sitting on the wall. I can see he’s on his phone now.

We touch pointers and then hold hands.

“Pshzzzz,” we both say. I can see Nora’s breath rise and fall below the wishbone of her neck. Back when both of our sets of parents were trying to hang their generational laundry on our wedding planning, we created this ritual, an energy field only big enough for us. 

I guess Elliot is in our force field now.

When Nora was giving birth, her screams were so animal and shrill. She was a woman I’d never met. A fucking professional wrestler I didn’t know I married. Those screams could not be incorporated—I’m sure they must be still happening. This world must be a veneer, for how piercingly Nora brought Elliot into it, each new cookie-cutter apartment building that goes up, like this one we’re standing under, made out of the force of feeling. In the birthing room, a monitor registered both Nora’s and the baby’s heartbeats. Simple contractions that rose numerically on the screen. 

The monitor was a small white TV fastened to the wall with a metal arm. It did not move. I watched it intently. I concentrated on it like a fire. 

I became the monitor.

As the monitor, I looked down at my wife screaming in the chair. I could not move. The person I love screamed, and I could only register the numbers. Over my heart, the numbers went up, and the numbers went down. But, if the numbers went too far down, if either of the numbers had gone down and down and didn’t come back up, as the professionals panicked and ran, I would’ve been frozen there, unmoving.     

The nurse laid our baby skin-to-skin on Nora’s chest, to latch. I cut the umbilical cord. The medical cords were all removed, the monitor turned off, but not really, because I’m the monitor.  

“When Elliot finally came,” I say to Nora, “Something big—something big moved.” 

“What do you mean? Something physical or emotional?”

“I felt something big move aside.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t want to say.”

Elliot does his pre-cry caw. A squirrel passes us too close. Bodega Guy hops off the wall and walks slowly toward us. 

“Me. I moved aside.” 

“You think you’re replaced.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t be replaced.”

Elliot begins to cry. I bounce a little to settle him.

We drop force field.

Nora puts her fingers under my chin and pulls my face back up. “You cannot be replaced,” she says.

I look over at Bodega Guy. I focus on his mouth next to the square of his phone, and I feel like I can see his lips forming the words “I” “miss” “you” to someone else.

“Slap me,” I say, looking back at Nora.

“What?” Nora looks at Bodega Guy, trying to see what I see. 

Elliot’s crying begins to escalate. I undo the straps, carefully pull him out of the Ergo, and hand him to Nora. He settles on her shoulder, eyes still closed, pulling at her shirt to nurse. The Ergo hangs on me like belly fat.

“I successfully made your birth story about me. Just slap me.”  

“You’re allowed to have feelings.” “I’m serious. Do it. Slap me.”

“Why?”

“I want it. You have to understand these feelings are never going to change. They’re in me too deep. It’s no use.”

Nora hitches Elliot.  

“Do it,” I say, “No matter how many people, in how my ways, tell me they love me, I’m never going to take it in. Ever.”

Bodega Guy doesn’t even look over when I scream “Ever.”

I feel her hand—the razor sharpness, and how it lives forever—on my face a split second before she does it.

Published March 22nd, 2020