Manischewitz Toothpaste
Lord, it has been a week.
7:30 pm is technically bedtime, but the girl doesn’t tell time yet. “I’ll tell you one more story,” she insists, surrounded by lavender sheets, a lavender pillow spray, and her lavender eyes. The story is always the same: the Easter Bunny steals her special blanket, and when he finally gives it back and says sorry, he gives her all the Easter eggs. The End.
So there we are, whispering in the dark, a splash of tequila in my coffee mug because it’s Friday night and, Lord, it has been a week. She tells me I need to rub her head before she sleeps. And I do, because I feel it. Bubbled up from my chest and into my hands: love, love, love.
Beach 67 is technically a nude beach, but we wait until dusk to strip and jump in. There are five of us tonight: one six months pregnant, one without the babies or the stretch marks, and three nursing mothers. I call us sirens because mermaids don’t know what curse words taste like on their tongue, and the five of us could make a sailor blush.
So there we are, swimming under the milky pink sky just before the dark, because Lord, it has been a week. Three of us swollen with milk, one swollen with another heartbeat, and all of us swollen on love, love love.
The shopping list technically says Manischewitz Toothpaste, but I know I couldn’t have meant that. There are three of us at the grocery store tonight: two in the cart with no shoes, only service, and me, desperately shopping before the tantrums begin; all of us sticky with half-eaten apples and tired from the day.
So there we are, in the toothpaste aisle, and I realize I likely wanted to buy Manischewitz and toothpaste, and to consider looking for some sort of hybrid was impossibly funny, because Lord, it has been a week. And I laugh, and so do they, little high-pitched cackles that make me laugh until I feel tears down my cheeks. And we stayed in the fluorescent lighting laughing, giggling out love, love, love.
I read once that men process other men’s voices like engines; the same part of their brain lights up when they hear a masculine voice as when they hear machinery. I don’t know what I think about that. However, they also claim that men process women’s voices like music. Like each different voice is a different note in a million different songs, and that, I believe wholeheartedly.
Because what is more like music than a woman becoming? The beautifully childless, the pregnant, and the nursing. The girl who can’t tell time and the mother half asleep, with her forehead resting on the edge of the crib. Shoeless, and laughing and sticky, and bold, and uncertain, and living.
These women are all songs I know well because I have been a million different voices, a thousand different women. Some days I feel more machine than human, but most days I feel like music; different songs but all the same words: love, love, love.
Lord, it has been a week.