Sweetness

Spring was unfurling her cherry-blossom fingers over the city. The streets were wet and perfumed with the smatters of flowers that April brought with it. They would bloom along the cobblestone walls for a few hot months, then drop into brown skeletons on the sidewalks, as they did every year. Today the air hung with a thickness, a confusing humidity that caused Mila to sweat through her vinyl raincoat but shiver when she peeled it off.

She had just emerged from the grocery store, a tin of sardines in her purse clattering against her keys. The night removed the usual soft green beauty of the neighborhood, the canal water glinting black against the moonlight.

This walk was quieter than usual. A thin rain fell, barely noticeable except for when she blinked and her eyelashes would clump together. The absence of life came as a relief, it gave her the appropriate space to brood. To consider the events that had transpired two nights before and had gone on to ruin her weekend.

The rain picked up steadily as she neared her apartment. It ran down the neck of her coat, her short hair clumping around her shoulders. The canal made deep, guttural sounds as it was lashed with the downpour. Somewhere on the bridge she was now crossing, a lock with her initials was hidden. Her high school lover had hung it there. She didn’t glance at it as she passed.

A café sat illuminated at the end of the street, glowing red with a tobacco sign. Hardly anyone was there, besides a very old man and a waiter, both smoking. She debated stopping and asking one of them for a cigarette, but it proved too much effort to wet her lips and clear her throat to form the words.

Mila didn’t allow herself to think about her mother until she was in the courtyard of the building. She knelt to slip off her heels before going up the staircase. The patent leather was slick in her grip.

It was silent. It pressed on the inner part of her ears.

What does death sound like? She wondered.

Does hearing linger ‘til your final breath?

The thought was kind of funny. She didn’t laugh.

The kitchen light was on in the apartment. She had probably forgotten to turn it off when she’d rushed out this morning. The syrup figs she’d opened for breakfast lay discarded on the counter, flies buzzing around the mouth of the jar. Her husband, Étienne, was lying asleep on the sofa. A flute of clear liquid sat on the coffee table next to him. She lifted it to her nose. Vodka. She considered waking him, but decided against it.

“Mila.”

Fingers dug into her shoulder, forcing her awake. Étienne stood over her. She sat up, unwinding her arms over her head.

“Mm. Good morning. When did you get home?” she mumbled, pawing her face sleepily.

“Yesterday evening. Why weren’t you here?”

He had spent the past week at his family’s second home in the South. Three hundred days of sun a year. The city was the arctic in comparison. Étienne was newly tan, his teeth pearlescent against his skin. She reasoned that if she kissed his collarbone it might taste like sunshine and saltwater.

“I went to the grocery store,” she said.

“For six hours?” he snapped.

Mila stared at him evenly. He was too pretty. She pictured him stretched out upon a terry-cloth towel on the beach, his skin wet and sandy. Other girls must’ve circled him like vultures, lone Étienne on his shy towel. He probably didn’t even wear his wedding band when he was out there. It gleamed, far too shinily, on his finger.

She lifted her chin. “I had to get out of the house. I’ve had a bad weekend.”

He softened at this, releasing his grip on her shoulder to sit on the bed beside her. “I know, baby,” he murmured, brushing a lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “That’s why I came home early, to be with you. But you weren’t here.” He reeked of alcohol.

Warm yellow light filtered in through the curtains. Mila wanted to open the window, it smelled strange in the bedroom. It needed air. The sheets should be changed, there were crumbs under her ass. She focused instead on the crust in the corners of Étienne’s eyes. The blue rings of sleeplessness… did he drink himself to unconsciousness solely because of her absence? She smiled at this, suddenly tender.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said, turning to wrap her arms around his neck. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Étienne liked the sardines. He had a sophisticated palette. He complained constantly about Mila’s— thought it to be beyond childish. She gorged herself on blueberries and gourmet chocolates. She only drank rosé or champagne. Vodka if mixed in with something sugary. He wanted to take her to nice Japanese restaurants or for street falafel. Mila ate, instead, cinnamon bagels with rosemary cream-cheese from the deli next door.

His delight at the sardines smoothed over whatever animosity had manifested overnight. He cooked them in olive oil and garlic. Mila thought it would be a shitty breakfast to start a shitty day, but he insisted that she would enjoy them.

“If you don’t,” he called to her over his shoulder. Steam rose above his head in a pseudo-halo. “It will be overpriced hot chocolate and raspberries for the foreseeable future.”

The smell of fish was nauseating. Mila opened every window in the apartment, gasping into the street. Stop being dramatic, Étienne told her. I can’t help it, she said. My mother is gone and my bedroom smells like the Dead Sea.

He watched her while she ate the fish. He went on about how she was an adult, she had to eat like one. She responded to each comment with a reminder of her weekend. When he got up to use the toilet, she sprung to the pantry and swept a finger into the creme de noisette. When he returned he stared at the brown crescent underneath her nail.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said quietly.

Étienne owned an art gallery in the gentrified center of the city. Every so often he would return home seething about a new cafe that had overturned another gallery. He couldn’t understand how Mila stomached these places, how anybody could loll about in the stiff chairs for hours, scrolling on their phones and vaping. He got visibly angry when he saw an English menu, inconsolable at the tourists wandering into his building in search of a toilet.

“This city,” he once spat. “is becoming Los Angeles.”

Étienne was incredibly French. He came from a long line of Parisians, those who summered in the South and returned to be miserable in Paris from autumn to spring. He found fault in almost anything he deemed to be non-French, and he was bare-bones to an aggressive degree— though he would only drink his coffee with syrups. Mila found it endearing, especially with how angry he would become when their coffee orders were priced so differently.

“There’s no fucking way,” he’d said to a waiter. Their bill was thirteen euros. “We got two things.”

Mila thought it was steep, too. She suggested that he start drinking espressos with sugar as she did. He thought she was making fun of him. She supposed that she was. He said espressos usually tasted like dog shit. She pretended to disagree.

They’d met three years prior, when Mila was eighteen and Étienne was thirty-two. She was sitting on the grass out front of a museum, a former friend to her left, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching the sun slowly set. He approached them with a dog, which he’d since gotten rid of, his hand braced over his eyes as a visor. He asked her to be his date to a gallery opening. She’d obliged.

The gallery was full of middle-aged men and late-twenties women. Nobody spoke to her except to offer champagne and ladyfingers. Mila was nauseous after an hour of it. Étienne fetched her medicine when she’d later complained of a stomachache. He took her to his apartment, let her have his bed. He slept in the guest room.

They married a year later. She had already moved into his apartment.

“Can I help you find anything?” The shopkeeper turned idle circles around the tiny store, watching Mila slip in and out of the curtained dressing room, appearing again and again in different black dresses. The current one had a high, lacy neckline, making it appear as if her body had been swallowed up by a creeping void. It made her hair seem almost white. She fingered it absently. She should cut it shorter, maybe above her chin. Maybe just shave it all off, though Étienne wouldn’t like that.

“Have you got any more black dresses?” she asked the shopkeeper.

The girl smiled falsely. “More?”

Mila had tried on about eight. This was something she especially disliked about vintage stores in the city— they all despised getting business. She could, of course, go somewhere expensive and first-hand, spend an ugly amount of money on a plain black dress, but she was attempting to be frugal. Maybe support the local economy, be a good samaritan.

“I’ve got a funeral to attend,” Mila replied, turning back to her reflection. She’d forgotten to finish her makeup this morning. She only had on red lipstick, which made her eyelashes too blond and her skin seem especially naked.

The shopkeeper nodded and apologized, fleeing to the back of the shop. She returned moments later with three dresses. They were all very boring, very black.

“These just came in yesterday,” the shopkeeper said.

Mila took the stack, ran her fingers along the fabrics, flipped the tags over. One hundred euros. One hundred twelve. Two hundred. Étienne would’ve vomited.

“I thought this was a thrift store,” Mila muttered, tossing them onto the counter. It was silver. Mila’s face went hot. A disco ball hung in the center of the shop, casting diamond-like light across every surface.

The shopkeeper narrowed her eyes. “Everything’s vintage.”

Mila ended up with a dress from Valentino.

The funeral planning was all in her hands. Her pink, well-manicured hands. Soft, so soft. Virgin soft. Hands that floated like silk over her husband and were soaked in cold cream on Wednesday nights. That leafed through magazines and scattered breadcrumbs to the swans on the river. She wondered if it would be inappropriate to add that all into the eulogy. If it would be in poor taste to wear her hot pink nail polish to the service.

If her family wasn’t useless she would’ve pawned some of the planning out on them. Unfortunately for Mila, they were all to a certain degree gone. Mila’s older brother died six years ago. Her sister had fled the city the moment she turned eighteen. Their father had moved to America years before. The day it happened, she called up her father and sister. Neither picked up. She drafted a vile email. She sent them funeral invitations by text.

That Sunday morning, the landline rang. The trembling voice of her mother’s landlady: “Is this Angelina’s daughter?”

“Yeah. Is she alright?” Mila rubbed sleep from her eyes. The woman had mispronounced Anzhelina. She didn’t care to correct her.

A pause. “I’m so sorry to tell you like this, but your mother has passed away. You don’t mind coming down here, do you? The police have questions.”

She might’ve said more, but nothing registered. The world was foggy, dreamland, a limbo. Nothing clicked until she was standing outside her mother’s apartment building in only her nightgown and leather heels, two policemen beside her. One officer had his hand braced on the small of her back, as if she would faint or flee with terror. He looked at her with so much kindness that it made Mila a little dizzy. They asked her about her mother— if she’d suspected this, if she didn’t mind coming down to the coroner’s office to identify her body? Of course she didn’t mind, of course she would listen to the report. How the water was brown, how blood had calcified on the sides of the tub. They let her see her mother stretched out on that silver table. Her skin was yellow. Her fingers were pruned.

Mila’s period started on the metro. She was acutely aware of the blood as it seeped through her cotton thong, crept down her inner thigh. She washed her underwear out in the kitchen sink, letting the blood pool freely down her leg as she scrubbed. There was a freedom in bleeding out like this, as if she was cheating the moon.

Her mother wanted an Orthodox burial. She wanted, also, to be laid on the dining table for three days after she died. Mila had brought it up to Étienne, who echoed her hidden thought of, no fucking way. Of course it was important to her mother, but the idea of eating on the table afterwards, or even walking out for a glass of water at midnight and seeing her body lying there… She decided, perhaps, she could just grant the rest of her wishes.

Mila slid her dress over her shoulders, shed it as she stepped into the bath. She had a few more people to contact. Texting was simpler than calling. Mom wanted an Orthodox burial. Mila googled what exactly that meant.

“I found your bloody panties in the sink again, Ludmila,” Étienne said, smoking a cigarette in the bathroom doorway.

Mila was still in the bath, resting her chin on the porcelain lip. The water had gone lukewarm and slightly pink. “Sorry,” she said. “My period started.”

He sighed, ashing on the tile. “It’s so fucking nasty, baby. In what world does that belong in the kitchen? Just wash them out in here.” His free hand tapped repeatedly on his pants pocket.

“Join me,” Mila splashed around in the water. He eyed it warily.

“Can’t, I’m about to make dinner. Would you like me to make you something special?”

Mila slid one leg out of the water and dangled it over the side of the tub. “I’d like an apple sliced up and something excruciatingly sugary.”

Étienne came closer and slid his hand up her calf. “You only eat sugar and fruits. You are excruciatingly sugary. Rotten teeth.” He kissed her thigh. His cigarette was mainly ash.

When he left the room, Mila hung her wrists over the side of the bathtub. She counted to three and slid her head under the surface. The light overhead rippled through a curtain of water.

Lamb pilaf on a porcelain plate and something that resembled oats. Étienne presented it to Mila with a dirty martini in a champagne flute. He never put his cocktails in the correct glasses. Mila pushed the drink away from her, disgusted. She was still damp, her cotton thong see-through from being wet. A pad was wrapped around it. Unsexy, but she couldn’t stand tampons.

“I read somewhere,” she said as he sat down across from her. Her lungs hurt slightly. She’d held her breath too long in the bathtub. “you develop a sugar addiction in your twenties.”

“That, or booger sugar,” he took a sip of his martini.

“Did you have one?” Mila asked. “Back in Pangea?”

He rolled his eyes. “Sure, the early humans and I fucked up some candy every now and then. But I’ve never been too into that processed American shit. Too much good real food in France.”

Mila smiled, imagining little Étienne eating Milka by the fistfull. “That’s a lousy excuse. France is full of shitty processed food.” She rested her chin in her hand. “You might’ve just been born an adult man. Maybe you’ve just outlived sweetness.”

He shrugged. He had made the food as practice for the funeral. Or maybe to entice Mila into eating something of substance. It only reminded her of the list of things she had to do. She fetched the apple she wanted from the kitchen, some white chocolate from the freezer.

“Are you free this Sunday for the funeral?” she asked.

Mila’s sister arrived Saturday morning. A rapid series of buzzes from the intercom, and Sveta’s voice rushed in. She was twenty-five now and looked like Hell. Étienne stiffened as she tore her way inside.

Mila hadn’t seen her since her brothers funeral. She’d been in the South for a year, had come home for just three days, then returned immediately. She had dyed her formerly white-blond hair a streaky brown, her roots growing in made it look like she was balding. It hung in soft waves to her ass. If it weren’t for the similarity of their eyes, she could’ve been a stranger.

Sveta had two leather suitcases in tow, a sheen of sweat over her broad forehead. Mascara was smudged beneath her eyes. She became a mother at twenty-three. Her life was incomprehensible to Mila. Her family made no sense. There was something understandable about her father. Running off to America with some tourist was adventurous— not one Mila cared to embark on, but an adventure nonetheless— but to trudge to the South to have children? It disgusted her. Sveta had been a model before Aleks died. Now she was only a mother.

“You look good,” she said to Étienne, grabbing hold of his hands with an enthusiasm that bordered on frightening. He kept a polite smile on his face, but Mila noticed him wipe his hands twice after they were released.

Sveta turned to Mila and opened her arms, pulling her into a hug. Mila could smell the bite of her armpits. “Baby sister,” she moaned. “You look terrible.”

Mila hugged her back lightly. She thought she looked pretty good. In fact, she was positive that she did. “Well, our mother is dead.”

Sveta released her. “Matthieu is parking the car,” she said. She pushed the suitcases onto their sides. They looked heavy. She didn’t ask for help and neither of them offered. “He’ll bring Mia and Leo up with him.”

Étienne’s mouth was frozen in a tense smile. He didn’t like children. He didn’t like Mila’s family in general. He pretended to, but he didn’t. And unlike Mila, he wasn’t good at hiding it.

The streetlights sent swaths of yellow light into the apartment. Mila was sitting up in bed, Étienne sleeping quietly beside her. His chest rose and fell beneath the sheets, a rumpled outline of his naked body. She watched him, her knees pulled up to her chin. Sleep would not visit her.

In the next room, there was a muffled cry from one of Sveta’s kids. The apartment felt large and royal when it was just Mila and Étienne inhabiting it, using the guest room for nothing more than storage and lazy sex on Sunday mornings. But the bed they’d usually fuck in was filled with squirming bodies. Sveta, Matthieu, Mia and Leo were all confined to one bed. A sweeter, more courteous Mila might’ve suggested Sveta sleeping in bed with her, but the idea had never been broached and the little family was crammed into one queen-size bed.

Étienne’s eyelids twitched, his mouth parting slightly and making a pop sound. His lips made the same sound when they fucked, when his eyes were closed as they were now and he rammed into her with a smack smack pop rhythm. It was endearing, almost precious. And he looked so much younger when he slept, his fingers curled innocently beside his flushed cheek. 

Mila reached out, laid one fingernail on his bottom lip. She pulled his mouth further open. He squirmed away, his eyebrows knitting.

“No…” he murmured, pawing his face.

“Sorry,” she said.

She went to the kitchen. Someone had left a brown paper bag on the counter. Oil seeped through the bottom. Mila peered inside, trying not to make noise. The crinkling of the bag shamed her, and she hunched over it like a starving alleycat. Inside there were four pain au chocolat and about a dozen pistachio choupettes. Probably tomorrow’s breakfast for Sveta’s family. She could’ve gotten enough for the rest of them. Mila had been kind enough to host her.

Dinner had been only three hours prior, Étienne had made onion soup pasta with grilled chicken and mashed potatoes. He’d passed around basket after basket of fresh bread and butter. Had served large profiteroles swimming in créme anglaise and chopped peanuts. Cosmopolitans and pomegranate seeds in glass bowls. Mila was not hungry. In fact, she was a little nauseous.

She peeled the bag open, her fingers trembling slightly. Trying incredibly hard not to stir the paper, Mila lifted a choupette out. It was light and sticky in her hand, and she lifted it to her lips slowly. She bit it in half, pistachio cream squirting onto her tongue. She slid the other half into her mouth and chewed ploddingly. She licked each of her fingers clean and wiped her hands on her nightgown. Then she folded down the top of the bag and went back to her bedroom.

Étienne was still sleeping, of course. His thin midriff exposed, his eyes moving quickly behind his eyelids. When Mila sat on the corner of the bed, he moaned quietly and pulled the blankets to his chin.

She laid in bed listening to Étienne breathe. There was still pistachio in her teeth. She swept her tongue over each one, swallowed down the spit. This was good, this was sweet, this was enough.

Mila went back to the kitchen. The bag still sat in the shadows where she had left it. Mila approached it with alleycat caution, inching her hand over the countertop, nails outstretched. This time, the bag crinkling didn’t have the same effect. She opened her mouth before the second choupette was even close to it, sliding the entire cake in. She chewed. She swallowed.

The third one materialized in her hands and she shoved it into her mouth without thought. The fourth. At the fifth one she sobered up a little and wiped her mouth. Then she kept going.

Ten minutes later Mila was back in bed, her stomach cramping and a thick nausea in the back of her throat. She drew her knees up to her chin and rocked slowly back and forth, rubbing a pressure point on her wrist. Étienne stirred beside her, his eyebrows furrowing. Mila burped.

“What’s happening..?” Étienne mumbled without opening his eyes.

“Nothing. Sleep.” Mila croaked.

Praying to Jesus over the toilet, Mila gripped onto the porcelain sides. She hated vomiting. It stripped her of agency and control, transformed her into this shivering animal that cannot just let itself let go.

She gagged, making her slam her head into the mouth of the bowl. There was a dull crack and she let out a yelp of pain. Her throat seized and she began to vomit. Wetness trickled down her temple, dribbled onto her nose and lip. Blood mixed with vomit, dripping into the soiled water. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see.

The light to the bathroom flicked on. Mila felt someone hovering over her, and she cowered herself down towards the tile.

“Are you okay?” It was Sveta. Her voice pinched with concern. Mila lifted her head, turned to look at her defiantly. “Oh, you poor thing.”

“I’m just a little nauseous from dinner,” Mila mumbled.

“Your vomit is green,” frowned Sveta, staring at Mila’s mouth. Mila wiped it self-consciously. A pastel smear stared back at her.

“I think Étienne poisoned me.”

“Not funny, Ludmila,” Sveta sighed. She crossed the bathroom to the sink and pulled a towel out from one of the cabinets. She returned to Mila with it dampened. Kneeling, she began to wipe down her face. Mila closed her eyes.

Sveta moved the towel down her eyelids, down her cheeks, across her mouth and chin. Her breath was hot and smelled of mint toothpaste. The sun was rising around her silhouette.

“Do you remember when we were younger and Mom would take us to the farmers market on Sundays?” Sveta asked quietly. She flipped the cloth to the other side and began to pat Mila’s face dry.

“I remember there was this old farmer’s wife and she would honeytrap Mommy with those overpriced blueberries,” Mila said, closing her eyes again. “And that one time, there was this great big rainbow over the sky. And it had been so grey before, and it was so blue after.”

“Yeah. We could see both ends.” Sveta hummed lightly. “I wonder why she stopped taking us.”

“Because she went crazy,” Mila laughed. Sveta stayed quiet. “She was fucking nuts.”

“I think she was just sad,” she murmured.

“We were all sad,” Mila leaned her head against the toilet bowl. “She just chose to be saddest.”

They sat in silence as Sveta finished fixing Mila up. She found a bandage for the wound on Mila’s forehead. She got to her feet and dropped the towel in the sink. “I’ll clean that tomorrow,” she said. “I just need a few more hours of sleep before the funeral.”

“Mhm.” Mila studied her fingers. “Thank you.”

Sveta lingered in the doorway. “Mhm.”

Mila walked that once-familiar, shadowy walk to the farmer’s market. Her head throbbed from where she’d hit it, and every few minutes she’d reach up to push the bandage around. Her breath stank of vomit, she’d failed to brush her hair. She crept through the cobblestone streets like a creature of the night, the freshly risen sun guiding her sidesteps.

The market smelled fragrant, of recent rain and the tang of newly cut flowers. She’d come as soon as Sveta left her, stumbling out of the apartment in little more than her clingy nightdress and a silk kimono. The trees shuddered overhead, sending showers of wide green petals. She kept her eye out for that old farmer’s wife. She’d probably passed away by now— it had been six years since Mila had visited this market. But part of her maintained a foolish hope of finding her among the wooden stalls.

Her stomach churned as she passed a stand selling baked goods. She swallowed down bile, pressed her hands deep in her pockets. The sickness passed.

A beautiful man passed her by. Mila followed him with her eyes until he escaped from view. Maybe there’s a science to it. Maybe even a neat moral. Of selling yourself as a child and becoming very, very privy to that matter in early adulthood. Mila imagined herself writing about it in an email to the world. Or an email to her husband. She passed the blueberry stands, then walked right back towards them.

You see, she pictured herself speaking to the crowd of mourners a few hours from now, I believe that’s where my sugar addiction comes from. The unbearable sins of childhood come in thick sacks upon your shoulders and by the time you’re twenty, it’s unbearable. You must finally collapse and BE A CHILD for a little while. Then you can go on and rebuild, continue on as that stoic princess you know you were always supposed to be.

By the stands of blueberries, Mila could feel her mother watching her. Watching with that blue, unflinching stare. She wanted terribly to go up and pet her cheeks and kiss her and remind her that yes, she would get the funeral she wanted. Mila’s throat was dry. She wiped her nose on the front, then back of her wrist, and approached the woman selling blueberries. It wasn’t her mother of course and it wasn’t the old wife she’d wanted it to be, but she was plenty old and had a bulbous red nose for Mila to stare at. She proposed a carton to Mila for two euro fifty.

“I can get that price at Monoprix,” Mila said.

“Then go to Monoprix,” snapped the woman. So Mila bought the blueberries.

Every woman looked a little motherly this morning. A little like her mother. Mila sat down on the bench and told herself to be good, no blueberries for bad bad girls. Bad girls who eat their nephews breakfast and vomit it up moments later. 

She opened the carton, lifted a handful of berries to her mouth. She began to text Étienne.

baby

i like to eat my fruits and candies and i like to pet cats in the street and wear stupid dresses and lay down in the grass with u on hot mornings

all of that vanishes by 30

so will my sugar addiction

Does this make sense, sweetness?

i want to be stupid

I want to be stupid a little longer

i’ll b home by 10 

i’ll tie ur tie for the funeral

i love u sosoososooo much

love ludmila 

When she looked down, the carton was empty. Birds sang above her and she lifted her nose upwards. Let the nausea roll over her once again.