Matter

In the early winter of her fortieth year, while Elon Musk was cleaning Twitter of enemies, Peru was cleaning its streets of protestors, and Canadian parents were cleaning pharmacy shelves of scarce children’s painkillers, Sheila Desai, oblivious to all this news, simply wanted someone else to clean her house. 

Her two kids wouldn’t do it. Her husband wouldn’t do it. He was too busy renovating the downstairs bathroom, one step in his project of flipping the house to which he had devoted himself, Sheila’s protests notwithstanding. He used to be a musician; he used to be cool. Now he just wanted to “build wealth.” Sheila couldn’t do all the cleaning. Up around her grew a jungle of essays, laundry, receipts, dishes, unopened mail. And she was inundated with grievances from her students’ parents about their grades. From both her students and her family, the incoming complaints had a theme. She was too strict, too exacting, too—in her principal’s words—“diminishing.”

“If the house isn’t up to your standards, maybe you need to relax your standards,” her husband said. 

“We’ll die of food poisoning and the kids will go to school in dirty clothes if that happens,” she said.

She proposed hiring a housecleaner.

“I’m not paying an immigrant woman to clean our house. That’s demeaning,” he said loudly enough that both their son playing a video game, and their daughter chasing the dog around the coffee table, momentarily flinched.

Sheila paused scrubbing at that night’s frying pan. “I am a second-generation immigrant woman, Pete! Me! I’m the exploited woman in this situation! I’m the brown woman you aren’t paying! Literally!”

He laughed. She laughed. It was a funny story, if she could make it into that, as a way to not lose her mind. He came up to her from behind and kissed her neck. “You shouldn’t use soap on cast iron, babe. I’ve told you a million times.” Both the kiss and his grandiosity over the pan annoyed her, but she didn’t let on, because she was also wondering: what do I need to change about myself to get him to pay for help? Groan and mope less? Become hotter? She made sure the kids weren’t looking, then ground her butt into his pelvis.

The dog barked. Her son farted. Her daughter coughed. Her husband flicked her nipple through her shirt then retreated to the bathroom to deal with the new tiles. She shoved half the dirty dishes in the oven and opened up her laptop on the kitchen counter to input more grades. 

An email popped up: the principal was asking Sheila to regrade a colleague’s batch of mishandled exams. 

Prophetically, her husband yelled “Damn!” from the bathroom at the same moment she noticed the sinister ring to their daughter Agatha’s cough. 

Little Agatha threw her torso across the coffee table, laughing between coughs. Their terrier head-butted her knees.

Sheila took hold of the dog’s collar just as a greenish wad flew out of Agatha’s mouth and plopped onto the glass top. Agatha’s curls stuck to her forehead, which, Sheila noticed, had turned, along with the rest of her face, a slight crimson.

“Let’s get you into the bathtub,” she said, pressing her hand against her forehead. She was very warm. The doorbell rang.

Lisa, the tenant who lived in their walkout basement, held out a bunch of bananas in one hand and a bag of clementines in another. Sheila almost threw the dog right into her knees, making Lisa skitter and laugh.

Regaining her balance, Lisa said, “Aw, hi there, Sheila, just wanted to offer a little gift of organic fruit.” She was in her twenties and had blue hair. 

Sheila muttered thanks, then closed the door. She said to her husband, now by her side holding two halves of a broken tile, “Why does she start every sentence with ‘Aw’? And does she think we don’t already have fruit in our house?”

In the upstairs bathroom, watching Agatha pour sudsy water back and forth between plastic cups, Sheila thought of the sound of a pot being struck against the hard surface of the tub. It wasn’t so much a thought as it was an occurrence in her brain. She couldn’t recall a specific memory of watching and hearing such a thing happen. The event had no place in her life’s narrative. But she could hear its sharp collision, then reverberation. She then imagined taking a cast-iron pan and doing the same, and wondered what it would sound like, what it would feel like in her hand. But her daughter, the water, and the toys were in the way.

Agatha slumped forward and put her forehead against the chrome tap. “My head feels funny.”

Sheila pulled Agatha out of the water and into a large towel, put her into last night’s pyjamas and into her unmade bed, then tried to find the thermometer in the bathroom cabinet. But she got distracted by a bubble in the wallpaper near where it met the backsplash. She pressed her finger against it. The wall behind it squished. She imagined an eyeball. Her own hurt for a moment, then Agatha called to her. The girl’s voice was becoming strange: a phlegmy, sputtering baritone.

Sheila felt she could fall asleep right there in Agatha’s bed. Her bottom felt like molten lead against the mattress, and a pressure seemed to be building in her neck. On the third page of the board book, she opened an orange flap to reveal a black and white dog living within.

“There’s the dog!” she sang. But Agatha had passed out on her shoulder. Sheila remembered she had not yet found the thermometer, and started to inch away to go find it, but Agatha growled and dug her fingertips into Sheila’s forearm. Agatha’s small body exuded heat onto her torso. 

And then it happened, while her body was completely still, pinned to the stillness of the child’s room, pinned by her daughter’s baking body to the bed. A sound came to her from the base of her skull. She intuitively knew from where it came. The sound was created by a hand crumpling a sheet of aluminum foil. It was a woman’s hand. An old white lady’s hand. She could see it in her mind’s eye. The knuckles of the hand crackled just as the foil did, and these things were attached to Sheila’s own little indistinguishable parts at the base of her skull, and made them crackle too. Then she realized she couldn’t distinguish between the hand, the foil, and the spot where her spine ended and skull began. It became—or it always was, she just took a while to realize the truth of it—one gesture and sound. The old white lady’s crackling hand crackling the foil, and the foil itself, was her own body.

Her son came to the door, rapping gently. Her eyes refocused on him. He whispered a question she couldn’t make out, but it sounded like “Where is it?” She wondered why he needed the thermometer as well.

“What?”

“Where’s Zip?”

Her mind had to recurse, and recapture the idea of their dog. “Outside.”

“What?”

“Outside! Where else would he be? God, why am I the brain in this house?”

He rolled his eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Don’t talk to me that way, Pascal,” she called after him, then Agatha bolted up, eyes snapping open, and coughed violently until she vomited—a spurt of yellow and brown—right there on the pink elephants marching across the lavender duvet.

The whole time—from Pascal’s interruption, to the vomit, to yelling to her husband to find the thermometer and get a glass of water and the single spoonful left of children’s liquid Tylenol—the hand with the foil didn’t go away. It wasn’t something she could entirely snap out of. It was part of her body now, and she could either tune into it—in quiet, still moments like when Agatha’s head lay on her lap and the others were downstairs—or be distracted away from it, in the moments of commotion when the whole family was around her. Like a ringing in the ears. Like a premenstrual ache in the breast. Her awareness of the hand that had taken up residence in her body persisted, even as she told herself that it was just exhaustion messing with her brain. 

Agatha’s temperature was 37.9—a mild fever, they agreed.  

They slept with their and Agatha’s doors open. Sleep was a gauzy mantle dragged across Sheila’s face by an unfamiliar white woman who smelled of a cellar and said, “Let’s open her up!” 

They woke multiple times throughout the night and took turns giving Agatha water after each coughing fit. When awake, Sheila registered that the back of her neck vaguely hurt, but she could no longer access the details of the old white lady’s hand. She briefly puzzled over the possibility that the woman in the dream was the woman whose hand it was. 

Sheila woke unprompted at 5:00 a.m. In the kitchen, she opened her laptop to book in a substitute teacher for the day. She called Agatha’s school to leave a message that Agatha was sick. She emailed her own school’s secretary a set of default lesson plans, then went back to bed. She woke again to an awareness that Pete and Pascal had left the house. But the details of the house around her had dimmed. Instead, she was waking to the scene embedded in the base of her skull: the crackling hand crackling the foil. She could hear it, feel it, and see it. The scene seemed to unfold within her as does one’s view when rounding a corner, or coming to the crest of a hill: the breath pauses at the vernal beauty of it. So entranced was she, eyes open and focused on the ceiling yet also seeing the hand with the foil emerge from a broad darkness, that she didn’t answer her cell vibrating on the nightstand.

“Sheila,” rasped Agatha from the doorway, her hair a mess and her pyjama shirt askew at the shoulders. Inside Sheila, the hand paused and tilted, as if to say, “After you.” 

“Why are you calling me Sheila, sweetie? Why not ‘Mommy’?”

Agatha stared at her with her blue eyes that had become unusually bright and glossy in the fever, then opened her mouth to cough. Mucus shot out, projectile-like, and landed on the carpet. 

Flanked by a roll of toilet paper and a jug of water and a cup, Sheila bundled herself and Agatha into their matching bathrobes and into a duvet on the couch, Sheila the big spoon and Agatha the little. With her foot she pushed a pile of unfolded laundry onto the floor. Open library books she knew were overdue littered the coffee table, punctuated with Lego structures and crumpled juice boxes. She turned on cartoons and got a whiff of Agatha’s hair: oddly, she smelled like vinegar.

Sheila texted her husband: 

can you please get some more children’s Tylenol?

what’s her temp, he texted back.

dunno yet but we’re out of Tylenol

you should take her temp

i know. will u get Tylenol

of course babe

She dialed her voicemail and listened to her principal say, “Are you coming down for the interviews? I have the questions ready if you want to look them over before the candidates arrive.” Her stomach sank. Nobody must have told the principal she was sick at home. Had the principal paged her over the PA system? Why had nobody told her—not even the secretary or her colleagues? Things shouldn’t fall apart so easily, she thought angrily.

She typed into the mail browser on her phone:

I am so sorry. Agatha has a high fever & is coughing so I’m at home. I put the job into the system early this morning when I was in a fog & forgot to email you. I can do the interviews over Zoom from home. Let me know. I’d be happy to set that up.

She despised her claims of sorriness and happiness. She felt neither.

Soon afterwards, a text message appeared from the principal:

You should just take care of your family. Sick days are sick days. Sidney will sit in.

Sidney? Bewildered, she thought of the enthusiastic new teacher in her department, who would certainly be in the running when Sheila’s headship would be posted again at the end of the term. But more than that: the inherent tone of the words “should” and “just” made her wither.

The back of her neck itched. She realized the hand and foil had faded from view and earshot.

Curled against her, Agatha stirred in her sleep and growled. Her pudgy arm shot out of the blankets and hit the phone out of Sheila’s hand. It thudded to the floor. “No phone,” Agatha whined, and dug the curve of her back hard into Sheila’s stomach. “Okay, okay,” Sheila whispered, stroking the back of the girl’s head until she could feel her sink back again into sleep. Sheila sank with her.

She dreamed her body was a container packed with the kind of pink putty her dentist had used to take an impression of her teeth when she got her mouth guard. She could not see the pink dental putty, but she knew that’s what it was. She could not see her body from the outside, but rather experienced it from the inside, even though she knew that on the outside, she looked the same—a woman with bones, arranged in space. On the inside, though, the seeing was not a matter of sight, but knowing. She felt the solidity, the contiguity of her self—she had no channels, no bubbles of air, no ligaments or bones like cobwebs and sticks. Just a singular, pink, airless substance. Except for one thing—the white hand, now a fist, holding the foil balled up inside it. As she became aware of the stuckness of the fist at the base of the spot where her skull should be, the fist began wriggling this way and that, creating tiny sucking sounds. Sheila began to wonder: where was the arm to which it was attached? Where was the opening in her skin through which the fist had entered? Who is the person who had punched her way up into the back of her neck …

The phone buzzed, waking her.

It was her principal. “Do you have the exams?” 

“No,” Sheila said, shocked by the sleepy gurgle of her voice. “They’re on my desk in the English office.”

“We need them by tomorrow. The parents are on my ass. I’ll bring them over at lunch so you can grade them. You feeling okay?”

“I think so. I mean, I was just sleeping.” The feeling of shock slid into one of shame. Sleeping instead of working. “Agatha is napping too,” she added, then regretted how servile this sounded, as if she needed to justify anything.

“You should take a test. You got any?”

“The exams? No, you—”

“No, I mean a COVID test.”

Sheila writhed at her own obtuseness. “Right,” she sputtered. “Right. We’re both going to take one soon.”

After she hung up, it struck her how the principal had shifted so quickly from telling her that sick days were sick days, to expecting her to remark all the exams that night. Had parents complained since she had initially texted Sheila? Things Sheila counted on—the routine procedure of booking a substitute, the reassurance in the principal’s text—were starting to seem like ruses.

Sheila made toast and brought some to Agatha. The girl stared at her with glassy blue eyes, took the plate, then tipped it and the toast onto the floor. Sheila yelled at her. Normally, this would make the child cry. But instead, she stared at her, opened her mouth spastically, rolled her eyes, and snapped her mouth shut.

“You bore me,” she growl-whined between her teeth. 

Sheila stared at her in miscomprehension then got a tea towel and dabbed at the jam and crumbs on the carpet. “If you think you feel sick now, you’ll feel worse if you have no nutrients in your body.” The clarity of her own statement shook her. It was like a pin jabbed into the soft flesh of the day’s strangeness and confusion. Then the jam-spotted carpet gave way under her fingers. For a second, she concluded this was the depth of the plush pile, but in the next second she realized it was the floor underneath, giving a bit, then bouncing back.

Sheila got up quickly, impatient with these disturbances. She had a track to stay on: find the COVID tests, take Agatha’s temperature again, make her drink juice. But then the hand returned, fresh and erect out from the darkness, like a sprout emerging from a crack in a dampened seed’s hull. There was a new sound: a husky swoosh, a dry falling. Sand. Sand? She could see the old white woman’s hand grasping then letting go, grasping then letting go. A stream of tiny brown things, practically tinkling down in a rush to the unseeable ground.

She blinked and found that she was now standing at the kitchen sink. The sound of the sand, or grains, or seeds—or whatever the hand was scooping then releasing, scooping then releasing—had crescendoed into a waterfall. The rushing sound filled her head. 

Lentils. They were lentils.

Then a redness moved out beyond the glass, on the snow. A redness, a brightness compared to the dark scene of the hand.

“Aw, Sheila, hey!” It was Lisa in a red coat, waving, calling to her. A brawny man in white glasses and a flannel jacket stood next to her.

Sheila opened the door and had to shout above the noise in her head, “What is it?” 

“We’re just heading out, but then I saw you—you were just standing there staring,” she laughed. 

“I’m not feeling well,” Sheila shouted. 

“Oh. What’s wrong?”

“Well, Agatha is sick. I’m fine actually. Just—” she suddenly felt like a weakling, a sucker. “Just out of it.”

“Why are you shouting?”

“Oh,” she shouted. Then shook her head, trying to get the waterfall to quiet down, and repeated, “Oh.” She stood there in her bathrobe, the cold of December getting into her kitchen, her hand on her forehead, thinking to herself that the effort was so immense. 

As Lisa came toward her like a bright red wave, Sheila felt another wave behind her, this one grey and muscly.

“Sheila, for fuck’s sake, you’re letting the heat out,” her husband was saying. He put his hands on her shoulders from behind. Then in a less frustrated tone: “Thanks for the fruit yesterday, Lisa. All good?”

“Yeah, just saying hi. Feel better soon.” But he was already reaching around his wife to close the door on Lisa. He peered skeptically through the window at the man by her side.

“No way she’s a lesbian,” the husband mumbled.

“She never said she was a lesbian,” Sheila said. “Just queer.” There it was again—an automatic clarity, disconnected from her otherwise foggy mind.

He turned to look at her so closely she could smell the old things she knew he neglected between his teeth. “What’s going on? Are you sick too? Didn’t you get my text? There’s no Tylenol anywhere.”

“No, no—” but he was already turning away, asking after the child.

And then the hand heaved its existence into the forefront of her awareness. It had always been there, she sensed, but in this moment she felt it so completely that she could sense barely anything else. But she felt it, and knew how it would appear from any vantage point. She was not even seeing it from one angle. It was as if she were all the senses apprehending the thing from all possible angles in all possible dimensions, from several distances—within an arm’s reach, up close, inside—and all at once.

There was an absurdity to the single word that punctuated the world outside Sheila’s epic body-dream: “Where.”

“Where what?” the man asked her.

“No,” Sheila said. She watched him take a thermometer out of Agatha’s mouth. His movements comprised a diaphanous screen playing out above her real experience: the matter of the lentils being scooped up then released by the old white lady’s hand inside the base of her skull. When did that man even give the thermometer to that little girl on the couch? Two other men on the TV played with a monkey.

“38.5. Shit. And there’s no Tylenol anywhere,” he declared.

Sheila stood in her bathrobe, both feet planted on the floor, arms hanging by her side, mouth a bit slack.

“Sheila,” he demanded. “Why didn’t you do this earlier?”

She looked at him quizzically.

“Take her temperature,” he said. “Why didn’t you take her temperature earlier?”

The look turned blank.

“Are you having a stroke? Lift your arms.”

He came over, put his hands on her shoulders and jostled her gently. “C’mon, raise your arms.”

She giggled at his touch, turned her head away, and lifted her hands limply, then effeminately bent them at the wrist.

He was mad now. “Are you high?” he hissed. “Our daughter has a fever! The fuck you’ve been doing about it all day? Huh?”

“It doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t what? It doesn’t what?”

“Matter.”

Matter. It didn’t matter that the girl was sick. It didn’t matter not because there was an idea that she’d get through it. It just didn’t at all—none of its causes, or effects—matter. 

The words the man uttered in that explosive moment after she said “matter” also didn’t matter. 

The dog, who again started to bark unprompted, didn’t matter.

The nagging question of who would fetch the boy from volleyball practice after school?

The identity and meaning of the white woman—in her dream, inside her body.

The respiratory syncytial virus that was tearing through daycares and schools. 

The emergency room where, the next day, the man would take the little girl. And the children groaning on gurneys in the hallway there.

The border at Niagara Falls, an elaborate brutalist affair, that shrank the desperation of fathers and mothers down to the insignificant size of ants. Ants in shitty cars, in expensive shiny SUVs, in trucks, trying to cross the border to buy Tylenol in Buffalo. Old pot convictions prevented some of them. Expired passports, others. And what of the parents without status, papers, a vehicle, or money?

None of this mattered to Sheila.

The doorbell rang. The dog barked. Her ears filled with the shushing sound of lentils being picked up by the hand and dropped.

Sheila’s body remembered how to open the door. It came automatically. It was a quick motion. The edge of the door squished under her fingertips where she grasped it.

But the act of seeing was neither automatic nor quick. In the doorway was a brown wave, an undulating mass that signified geese, feathers, and goose shit. Behind the mass swirled fine wet snow.

The beak that opened to let out sound was not a beak. It had teeth. Neon white teeth. Someone had bleached them. The goose-lady must have bleached them herself. 

The sounds paused. The goose-lady was in a hurry, but donated this pause in her sounds so that Sheila could catch up.

“Thanks,” Sheila said, taking a heavy plastic bag from the goose-lady. The words came automatically. “There’s no children’s Tylenol.”

“It’s all over the news. Do you not read the news?” the goose-lady said in a way that made Sheila feel terrible.

Sheila opened the bag to look inside. A pile of hundreds of pieces of paper. None of the edges lined up properly. Some were tattered, dog-eared. Down into the bag went her mind, and the bag turned into a subway train, a machine carrying fleshy bodies through the non-fleshy, subterranean intestines of the city. The smell was like burning rubber. 

“I wouldn’t even know where to get some, otherwise I’d try to get some for you,” the goose-lady said, her voice a distant echo, like an announcer’s on a watery PA system.

Sheila quickly poked her finger into and out of the bag, to see if her finger would be snapped up and carried away by the train. Nothing happened. “Hmm,” she said. She looked up at the goose-lady, sharing her incredulity that her finger didn’t get snatched away, then down again. Into and out of the bag went her finger. It suddenly occurred to her that she needed to check the goose-lady’s hands. Were they old and white?

But before she could grab the goose-lady’s hand, the gray wave again came up behind her. The wave had big muscly arms that took her away from the door, while the goose-lady flapped and clacked her teeth. They were two waves of terrible judgment facing each other in the doorway, clacking and humming in some kind of aural dance, as Sheila retreated to the couch where she lay down with her daughter. A remaining wisp of a mother’s instinct made her put her hand, wet and cold from standing in the open door, onto the girl’s hot forehead.

The cascade of lentils disappeared. 

Sheila slept.

The weather outside worsened. Snow turned to sleet. The man prowled around the house, opening then slamming shut cupboards and drawers, and punching his thumbs into his phone. She wanted to get up and tell him to pick up the boy at 4:30 p.m., but this dream-thought never followed her up into wakefulness.

She was aware of the girl’s breathing. When it slowed, she woke up to look at her fine babyish nostrils to make sure the breath was still there. When it quickened, she stroked the girl’s head in a plea to get her back to sleep. When it was neither fast nor slow, Sheila’s body permitted her to sleep, and in that state, the strict edge of a shovel smashed down into a layer of half-melted ice. The ice broke apart. The shovel scraped it away. The sound of the shovel on the cement was like the cascade of lentils. A gushing curtain of sound. 

Through the curtain, she was aware of the change in cadence when the TV show broke for commercials. She was aware of the man nudging her and announcing he was going back to work. He shook a clear bottle of blue liquid in her face.

“Keep her hydrated, Sheila.” He coaxed the girl to sit up. She coughed for a long time. Then he made her drink. “You gotta stay hydrated, baby.” 

The girl croaked, “Sheila smells bad.”

Through the curtain, Sheila watched the man and the little girl turn to look at her. They were all related, somehow. She was, all at once, trying to decipher the outer world, and the inner problem of whether she was the shovel, the cement, or the ice.          

The girl lay back down into the crook of Sheila’s body. The man looked Sheila right in the eyes, coldly. He said something about calling his mother, about splitting adult pills in half. 

The shovel broke off a particularly thick slice of ice and scraped it to the side. Sheila grunted in appreciation, but her eyes were locked on those of the man. His face pinched in anger.

They slept. The cartoons persisted. The dog walked to the back door, pawed it, whined, then glumly padded back to the squishy spot by the couch where he lay down in defeat. 

The shovel slammed down its sharp edge, broke, scraped. It kept finding more ice to destroy. The melting ice on cement was endless, like an ocean. 

The big woman and the little girl, they slept. Sweat pooled behind their knees and in the little divots above their chins.

Another change of cadence: the sound of the tenant out back, opening and closing the door to the basement, then opening and closing it again. For a moment, a clear and reasonable idea formed in the woman’s mind. A functional solution. 

An hour later, things really started to take shape.

“Thanks for the Tylenol,” Sheila said to Lisa. She held her bathrobe together at the neck. Her greasy hair whipped across her face in the diagonal freezing rain. Lisa grinned. 

“I’ll pay you to clean my house,” Sheila sputtered.

“Pardon?”

“You clean my house, I’ll dock a hundred off your rent. Sound good?”

Lisa’s face contorted in thought.

“It won’t take more than three hours.”

These last words sounded desperate. Lisa agreed.

Agatha’s fever broke. 

The two women became friends. Lisa turned out to be a unicorn of sorts. She told Sheila the right things to say to Pete. How to set boundaries. How to push him, for more effort, for better sex, for separate bank accounts. The two women started to smoke pot in the garage at night, and talk about literature, and kiss. Lisa taught Sheila how to feel better. 

That was her dream.

In the un-dream, Sheila ran down the street without shoes. Nobody was around to see. Everyone was at work. She was thinking she’d go get her son at 4:30 p,m,, but she was too ill to drive. Her hand was putty. It was stuck around another hand—paler, smaller. The other hand belonged to the little girl she was dragging behind her. She didn’t have shoes either. She laughed and then screamed and then fell onto the ground and cried. Sheila had to get down on her knees to console the little girl. There in the middle of the street in the middle of the wave of freezing rain crossing Southern Ontario, both in their white fluffy bathrobes, Sheila stroked the girl’s wet hair. My daughter, she thought. She watched her hand stroking her daughter’s head, and remembered her name was Agatha. And then: what a pale, creased, shaky hand. And why is Agatha’s hair so wet? She couldn’t remember how it got wet. She couldn’t remember why there was so much snot on her hot little face. Later tonight, in the garage, she has to give Lisa her old copy of Within a Budding Grove, and she should tell her about this, about Agatha’s face—maybe she’ll know why it looks like this.