We're sitting in the driveway after a nice night: Italian meal, not-cheap wine, easy talk. I figure I might as well introduce him to Mom, who's watching the kids, because he'll probably be around for a while. If she finds fault with him, so what? She's already found fault with him: she said something must be wrong with him if she hasn't met him yet and I said maybe you haven't met him yet because something's wrong with you ha ha ha and then she said ha ha ha but really, why haven't I met him? And I said two months is still new and I want to keep things light and she said I've known you since before you were born and you don't want to keep anything light, you want to swim in darkness, and I said where did you get that idea and she said from everything you do and don't do and say and don't say. And I said that when I said I want to keep things light I meant not-heavy, not not-dark. I don't want not-dark but I also don't want dark, I tell her. I want an intense grey.

And that's what I think I have now, with this man, and I want to show my mom, say, look what I found! I take a deep breath—I guess I'm nervous—and start to invite him in, but he takes his own deep breath and says how I sound and what I say are two different things, just like most of the songs on Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. He says this causes tension, artistic tension in Bruce Springsteen's songs but psychological tension, for him, when I do it, as well as interpersonal tension for us. The thing is, I don't know what he's talking about. I just say things the way I say them. But he insists that my loving words sound mean and my mean words sound sweet. He says it's like your eyes say no but your mouth says no and yes. Then he says I'm not talking about no to sex, saying no to sex is your God-given right, I'm just talking about the ways the sound of your voice or sense of your words says no to me, my essence. A person's essence, he says, feels the smallest no more than it feels the biggest yes, because the person's essence itself is a yes and the no is a foreign object. And I'd given him spiritual tetanus with my sound-sense discrepancy. He should probably break up with me, he says, before the spiritual tetanus gets worse, but then again, he had mixed feelings about Born in the U.S.A. when it came out, and now, decades later, he understands its full brilliance and beauty, so maybe one day he'll understand my full brilliance and beauty and I'll be like his now all-time favorite Springsteen album, except we'll have sex, but only when I want to, I've only had sex with him when I've wanted to, right? And I say right, because it's true, I really, really wanted to. And he says, you're doing it again. And I say, doing what? And he says, Oh my God, I don't think I can put up with this. And because I don't know what else to say and don't understand what he's saying, I say, okay. And then he screams, Okay? Okay? Okay? in the way he thinks I said it and the way he thinks I said it is girlish and mocking or maybe he's just mocking my girlishness even though I'm not a girl, I'm a woman, but what do I know? I mean, seriously, what do I know? I know just enough to leave the car crying and when I get inside my mom says, oh no, what did he do, but her eyes say oh yes and I'm swimming in darkness, and then I stop swimming, I go down in, and I say, from the darkness, what's wrong with me and she says, nothing, baby, not a damn thing.


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Jennifer Wortman is the author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.—a collection of stories. She's a recipient of a 2020 NEA literature fellowship.

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