{"id":2647,"date":"2014-09-21T14:29:20","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T14:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=2647"},"modified":"2014-10-13T12:54:47","modified_gmt":"2014-10-13T12:54:47","slug":"these-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=2647","title":{"rendered":"THESE THINGS – Karen Havelin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laura considered it an established fact that the female body was a pain in the ass.
\nFrom youth it was constantly wracked by hurricanes, snow and rain\u2014by cramps and
\npains, premenstrual craziness, menstrual craziness, post-menstrual craziness, Pill-related
\ncraziness, loss and gain of weight and libido, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, not
\nto mention the smorgasbord of ridiculous changes that was pregnancy. There were so
\nmany things that ached, cramped and eventually drooped. So many places an eponymous
\ncancer could settle\u2014breasts, uterus, ovaries\u2014and so many specifically female illnesses.
\nThe male body seemed like a sunny campsite in comparison.<\/p>\n

But for weeks that fall\u2014or was it actually months?\u2014the suspicion that something
\nwas really wrong kept resurfacing. Some kind of hormonal surge was making her
\nstrangely angry in ordinary situations, like the weekly meetings at work. She hadn\u2019t felt
\nanything similarly uncontrollable since she was pregnant with Ella.<\/p>\n

When Laura finally did see a specialist in late November, it became clear that she
\nwas in fact leaving the troubling days of having a female body behind. She was only 36,
\nbut was in menopause\u2014or \u201cexperiencing premature ovary failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes these things just happen,\u201d the doctor said.<\/p>\n

Laura\u2019s daughter, Ella, was almost four. She was very pale and often quiet. Her
\nhair was fine and light. During winter, she sometimes reminded Laura of a little jellyfish.
\nShe was beautiful and perfectly formed, neither plump nor limp, but it was as if her small
\ndoll features were made of something a bit too fragile. As if, if you pricked her, clear
\nliquid would leak out and she might disappear completely. As she gazed at Ella picking at
\nher oatmeal, what her mother used to say to her when she was a kid would pop up in her
\nmind: \u201cYou have to eat your dinner or you\u2019ll shrink until there\u2019s nothing left of you but a
\nlittle wet spot!\u201d<\/p>\n

Mornings alone with Ella were Laura\u2019s favorite time of day. She would wake to
\nthe alarm and pad quietly into Ella\u2019s bedroom, a converted dressing room with pale
\nyellow wallpaper. She would lift Ella out of her bed in the corner and carry the lovely
\nsleep-scented bundle of her into the warm bathroom, then set her carefully down on her
\nfeet in the middle of the floor. Ella would stand there quietly blinking and yawning while
\nLaura unbuttoned her footie pajamas and dressed her while NPR played at low volume on
\nthe radio. It took about half an hour before Ella started speaking in the mornings. Before
\nthat, the only noise that came from her was the sound of her small breaths when your ear
\nwas next to her mouth. She was perfectly self-contained, like a peaceful little animal.<\/p>\n

The first hot flash arrived at work, and was nothing more than a little frisson, like
\nblushing. Finally something that isn\u2019t as bad as they say, she\u2019d actually dared to think.
\nTwo months later she was waking up glowing with heat every night, the bed soaked with
\nsweat. At any moment during the day, a wave of intense heat could start on her back
\nbelow her bra and spread up the back of her neck and over her forehead, and sweat would
\nbreak out all over her body. It seemed to predominantly happen when she was out
\nsomewhere, in the supermarket, at work, or having a conversation with someone in Ella\u2019s
\ndaycare. Clothes became a sudden terror. All these garments hemmed her in, clasps and
\nbelts and zippers and buttons choking her. Even if she could have undressed, she
\ncouldn\u2019t have gotten them off fast enough. Her hair was in her face all the time, and this
\ncut didn\u2019t even look good. It was January but she\u2019d never sweated so much in her life,
\nfourteen New York summers included.<\/p>\n

There were other changes. She was aware that her face was becoming drawn, like
\nwhen you put your fingers on a face of clay and pull so its entire character is changed.
\nShe was aging. A deep frown was settling. Her eyes were irrevocably starting to belong
\nto a sad face. A face people might snag on and look again, because she looked really
\nawful, heartbroken. She would see people like that, people who couldn\u2019t muster up the
\nenergy to conform their faces to what the world expected, and she\u2019d imagine that they
\nwere going through a divorce, or God forbid that their child had died. She\u2019d sat across
\nfrom a stylish middle-aged lady with sharp Louise Brooks hair on the subway one day.
\nThe toes of her lace-up boots were turned towards each other. Her lipsticked mouth
\nsuddenly opened like she was about to scream for her life. Laura braced herself, but it
\nwas just a yawn, just what a yawn looked like for someone for whom nothing was ever
\nall right.<\/p>\n

The subway in particular was becoming intolerable; the need to keep track of Ella
\nand two sets of gloves, scarves and hats for the freezing wind outside, while all the time
\nangling her shoulder for her purse and carrying bags of heavy groceries, always in a
\ncrowd. People never gave up their seats. Not to mention refraining from snapping at Ella
\nfor all her sudden three-year-old projects that slowed them down and created chaos. So
\nmany parts of maintaining daily life were painful and annoying. A sudden enormous
\nanger at it all would arrive with an intense desire to tear, kick and push. People in her
\nway, the paper bags containing heavy red cabbage she had bought to get some of those
\nhealthy whatevers it was that dark color vegetables had. Did the cabbage even have it?
\nDevoid of antioxidants, heavy, upsetting to the stomach. Why had she even bought the
\nstupid thing! Oh for the love of GOD! She found herself more and more often thundering
\ncurses at inanimate objects that didn\u2019t work, things that spilled and fell, stinky, staining
\noil from the expensive sardines she tried to eat for her bone density\u2019s sake. Objects
\ndropped, broken and trailing behind her, stacks of clothes falling out of the closet when
\nshe was trying to get a box of papers down without bothering to get a chair to stand on.
\nFuuucckk you, fucking behave your fucking self you fucking goddamn piece of shit! She
\nhad to invent new curses to fit all her anger, the indignity of it all. They melded with her
\nattempts to not swear in front of Ella into strangely inventive and sometimes extremely
\ncrude words. Ratmonster fuckshit! Assbastardbloodycrapfuck!<\/p>\n

She had lots of time to ruminate. While her workdays at the bank were long, they
\nwere also dull. There were friends, but you always had to plan things a long time in
\nadvance. Somehow when it came down to setting something up, it seemed easier to just
\npostpone making a call. In the end she often watched TV for hours in the evenings in
\ntheir tiny living room, restlessly getting up from the couch to tidy a drawer or to lean over
\nthe dinner table and look out the window onto the street.<\/p>\n

Her friends had been telling her to start dating again, and one morning in the
\nprivacy of her cubicle, walls covered in Ella\u2019s drawings, she finally created a profile on
\nan online dating service. She spent a half hour trying to come up with a good username
\nwhile overhearing her boss on the phone a few doors down. Finally, the rather awkward
\nUWSmom was the best she could do. Something made her check all the boxes of things to
\nbe interested in. Short and long term dating, activity partners, and after hovering over it
\nfor a while, casual sex. After a lot of doubt she included an old full blurry figure photo
\nfrom an old vacation email. She was pretty sure her face couldn\u2019t be completely
\nrecognized. She only filled in the profile with a few brief sentences about liking to read
\nand listen to music. Still, within the day, the inbox steadily filled with messages from
\nmen who politely inquired about her day and her preferences in literature. Amazingly
\nenough, none of the messages were crude, even though it was clear that they were writing
\nto her because of the casual sex. She could click on their profiles and look at all these
\nyoung attractive men she in theory could go out and meet as soon as she could get a
\nbabysitter. There they were, displaying their tan, ripped bellies at what seemed to be an
\neternal barbecue party chock full of young handsome men laughing at the camera with
\nraised beer glasses. She leaned close to the screen, tilting her head with her mouth open.
\nHow much would she have to do to her body before she could show it to anyone? Would
\nher razor and a month of nightly Pilates in front of the TV do it? What an idiotic waste to
\nwait until now to do this.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"nn,Karen Havelin is a writer and translator from Bergen, Norway. She attended Skrivekunst-akademiet i Hordaland, and has a Bachelor\u2019s degree in French, literature and gender studies from the University of Bergen and University of Paris Sorbonne. She completed her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in May 2013. Her poems have been published in Norwegian literary magazines. She currently lives in Oslo, Norway and she is working on a novel about themes of the body, such as illness, pain and sexuality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura considered it an established fact that the female body was a pain in the ass. From youth it was constantly wracked by hurricanes, snow and rain\u2014by cramps and pains, premenstrual craziness, menstrual craziness, post-menstrual craziness, Pill-related craziness, loss and gain of weight and libido, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, not to mention the smorgasbord [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-2647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prose","tag-sophie-saunders"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2647"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2694,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2647\/revisions\/2694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}