It is not a perfect body, and in fact mine is better, though hers is smaller by a size or two. I feel boring for the compulsion to compare myself to her, and even a little mean, but her serenity bothers me. It bothers me that she doesn’t wear prettier underwear, that her marriage is inscrutable and involved, and that I am somewhere inside it. I get onto my knees and join her on the carpet, and even this small action is enough to render my body into a font of unsavory noise. Rebecca makes room but does not look at me. We enter corpse pose, and as we lie side by side, I hear her short, irregular breaths and understand the degree of her effort. It feels personal. The finite oxygen, the smell of yeast and salt, deodorant and shampoo, the body when it is most conspicuously an organism, a thing that can weep and degrade. I rise with her into something called dolphin pose, and it feels silly until it burns. I used to exercise with my mother. A new diet guide or juicing blade would arrive in the mail, and for a week we would eat only cabbage soup. For a week we would attempt a kosher Atkins, my mother emerging from the Seventh-day Adventist pantry with steak substitutes made of plant protein. We bought in bulk but always seemed to eat very little, one week just coffee with Danish butter, the next week only foods that were yellow or green. While my father took women into his study, we descended upon the living room in Lycra for Zumba, eight-minute abs, or whatever lo-fi glute blasting was available via early aughts on-demand, alternating between tearful, formerly fat barre gurus, white capitalist body-posi rah-rahs with creepy yonic overtones, and the more classic motivational speakers who slap you over the face with a box of Ho Hos and compel you to squat. We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal.

* * *

After another measure in corpse, I follow Rebecca into the kitchen and watch her portion ingredients. She pushes a clove of garlic in front of me and offers me a knife, blade first. When I take the knife, a thought comes to me fully rendered, complete with texture and aftermath: I could, in the right state of mind, murder her and carry on with my life. Really it would be her fault, for inviting a stranger into her house and providing the knife. Her composure is infuriating. I start to tell her that when I fuck her husband, I’m the one who does the fucking. But the impulse passes, and I spoon the garlic into the oil. The sirloin follows, and as the potatoes are coming out of the oven, one of Rebecca’s big oven mitts slips off and onto the floor. She sucks the burned finger and then forgets about it to take a bite of the steak. She offers me her fork and I follow suit, the meat bloody and tough. It is the best thing I have eaten in weeks. I close my eyes. When I open them, she is smiling.

“How long have you known Pradeep?” I say, and she tilts her head.

“I don’t know. A few years. He’s a good kid,” she says, good kid a little gooier than the rest of the words.

“You like him.”

“He’s young. He hasn’t been disappointed yet. Sometimes I forget what that looks like—you know, optimism,” she says, and I want to ask how old she is, but I refrain. “Why do you ask?”

“It just seemed like he was being kind of hard on her.”

“She needs a firm hand,” she says, though she has stopped eating, stopped smiling.

“It wasn’t like that. The way he was talking to her, it felt—specific,” I say, and there is no fluffy alternative word for what I’m trying to convey, no way to effectively explain violations that are not overt. It is a rhetorical hellscape. A casual reduction so frequent it is mundane. Almost too mundane for the deployment of the R word, as with a certain sect of Good White Person the accusation overshadows the act. Racism! I should yell, because I’m sure Rebecca will receive it in the uppercase regardless, and already I feel her seizing on the drama of its implication, even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes. So it has taken a long time for me to get here. To say, Yes, this is what happened. It happened just like that. But when Rebecca turns and scrapes the rest of her food off the plate and into the trash, I feel like a jerk. She looks at me, any goodwill that existed between us lost.

“I am her mother,” she says firmly, though there is a hitch in her voice and her face colors. “You are a guest,” she says before she sweeps out of the room, and I find it very rich, to have been invited here partly on the absurd presumption that I would know what to do with Akila simply because we are both black, and now be rebuffed when I have not performed the role of the Trusty Black Spirit Guide to her taste. I go back up to the guest room and pack my things. I wait for her to put me out. I lie in the dark with my shoes on, wondering if I was wrong to say anything. I compile everything I could have said if I were faster, smarter. By midnight, I have a carefully footnoted Spike Lee joint, an entire treatise on the conspiracy of oppression, though at one o’clock when I have rehearsed my supporting data and reimagined our conversation as one in which I don’t let Dr. King down, I suddenly feel that she can go fuck herself, that my intellectual labor should be subsidized and the onus is not on the oppressed to consider the oppressor, though in the morning after I take a shower, I look out of the window and see her lugging a bag of mulch across the yard and I feel guilty all over again. Her chunky, tragic sneakers and freaky competence. The way the windows around the cul-de-sac are dark and she is the only person outside, already engaged enough in her task to be making a lot of supremely unsexy noise. It becomes clear to me, how keenly she is alone.

* * *

I creep around the house and try to be racially neutral. I avoid her as best I can, though I hear her all around the house: doing dishes, Pilates, and some involved activity with a power drill. In my effort to be sensitive to where she is, I find that she is an extremely noisy person. I can’t say whether this is for my benefit, but even on the other side of the house the noise feels indirectly violent, her predilection for walking on her heels and shouting yes! to her Insanity DVD well within the realm of plausible deniability, but intimidating nonetheless. So I keep mostly to the guest room and scan through jobs. I look at availabilities in the city, but even if I was granted an interview, I have no idea where I’d be commuting from. I browse StreetEasy, and every neighborhood in my price range is lousy with sexual predators. Just as an experiment, I see what comes up if I keep my search within Jersey. I check the commute from the house to a small textbook publisher in Hoboken, and it is a straight shot. I imagine what it might be like to ride exclusively on NJ Transit, which has significantly less feces than the G. I read through requirements for entry-level jobs that are not requirements so much as requests that the applicant have “a good sense of humor” and basic tech literacy for 41K a year. I tweak my résumé, omit coordinator from my title, and revise my role as more author-facing. I stress my editorial involvement, though the author of the Flounder series stopped calling me when I made him a mixtape.

* * *