Page 44 of Close Reading

The door closes behind her. The room settles. Marcus opens his laptop to the chart again, satisfied. Kim types. The La Marzocco hisses.

I finish my coffee. I leave Lavender House and walk to campus in the February cold.

Not today. But soon. The orbit is decaying. The collapse is coming.

And when it comes, I am going to be there.

23

MARGOT

Sophia gets her first period on a Saturday in late February.

I am ready. I have been ready for years. In the bathroom closet, second shelf, labeled and organized: pads in three absorbencies, tampons in two sizes, iron supplements, Midol, ibuprofen as backup, a high-quality heating pad in its original packaging, and a book I selected after reviewing seven options on the basis of accuracy, sensitivity, and the absence of condescension.

Sophia finds me in the kitchen. Pajamas, bare feet on the cold floor, an expression adjacent to alarm but not quite it. She has known, intellectually, that this was coming, and she has just met the difference between knowing and experiencing, between the concept of a thing and the thing itself.

“Mom.”

“Yes?”

“I think I need you to come to the bathroom.”

I go. I assess. I retrieve the supplies from the second shelf with calm efficiency. I explain each item, what it does, how it works, what she can expect. I deliver this information in the same register I use for lectures: clear, specific, unhurried. If the whisper lecture was about women’s literature delivered over a sleeping baby, this is women’s biology delivered to a daughter who is processing new information about her own body and who trusts the person providing it.

She listens. She asks three questions, practical, specific. She has learned my approach to the unknown: gather data before forming a response. She takes the pad. She goes to the bathroom. She emerges five minutes later, composed, slightly embarrassed, entirely herself.

“Can I use the heating pad on the couch?”

“Of course.”

We are on the couch, heating pad across her lap, chamomile tea in her hands, the Saturday morning quiet of a house absorbing a change, when the doorbell rings.

I open the door. Priya is on the porch.

Nobody called her. I am certain of this because I have not called anyone. I sent one text, to Bea, brief, uncertain: I might need Miriam.

I sent it to Bea because Bea is the one I have sent things to for twelve years when the thing was too large for the system to hold, which was rare. I did not send it to Priya, not because I did not want her here, but because the wanting was so immediate and so deep that the sending would have been an admission I was not prepared to make at 8:00 on a Saturday morning, my daughter on the couch, the whole apparatus of my preparedness suddenly insufficient because preparation, no matter how thorough, cannot account for the moment when your daughter needs something you cannot provide from a closet.

Priya is holding a bag. She is slightly out of breath, wearing a sweatshirt with a golden dog hair on the left shoulder. Always the left shoulder. Kali’s resting spot.

“I heard,” she says.

“How?”

“Bea texted me.”

“I texted Bea about Miriam.”

“Bea texted me, Miriam, and Marcus. Marcus texted me again to say that the moon is in Cancer today and this is cosmically significant. I texted him back to say I was driving and he texted me a series of moon emojis.” She pauses. “I’m here.”

She is here. She drove here. She drove to my house on a Saturday morning because Bea, who has known me for twelve years, who watched me in the trees with the tenure tray, who said I’ve got you, honey on the worst day of my life, texted her, and Priya came. It simply happened, the way Priya happens—fully, without strategy, arriving at doors with bags of things and warmth that does not wait for permission.

The bag contains a box of chocolate truffles, a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips, and a stuffed dog.

The stuffed dog looks exactly like Kali. Same golden color, same slightly deranged expression, same general air of a creature who has seen things and eaten some of them. Its belly has a velcro opening. Inside, visible through the gap, a small heating pad, designed to be microwaved.

“It’s a Kali heating pad,” Priya says. “I found it at that toy shop on Hawthorne. The belly warms up.”