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By Root 2313 0

posted in front of our building on the frozen grass in his houndstooth suit, bow tie, and long blue-and-white-striped scarf, was shouting into the narrow end of his megaphone about man and beast and God. The protesters shielded their children’s eyes so they would not see the faces of the sinners, as they pumped their handmade cardboard picket signs up and down in the air, screamed their throats bloody, pointed their fingers at Lydia and Tal, and shouted “SINNER,” and “DEFILER,” and “WHORE.” They spat at them, and on them if they got close enough. Lydia and Tal pushed through them and made it to Lydia’s car, the paint job of which had recently been ruined by a palimpsest of defacements, and was now covered with prayers and Bible quotes and crude crosses that had been scratched with keys into the silver-blue paint. Tal opened the passenger-side door for Lydia, saw her in, and got into the driver’s side, squeezed the vehicle out of its parallel parking spot and onto the street. The protesters crowded around the car, spitting at it, screaming at the rolled-up windows, drumming with their fists on the doors and hood.

Tal did not come back until long after dark. I’d already watched Pinocchio three times. I was starving. Tal reheated some leftovers for us to eat, and we ate together in near silence. I cried. She cried. Then she pulled herself together, stopped her tears, and washed the dishes. Tal slept on the couch that night, after sharing one of her lumpy white cigarettes with me.

Lydia came home from the hospital the next day. Her hair was completely gone, and her bald head was partially covered with a white bandage. She went immediately to bed.

The doctors had strongly recommended radiation therapy to follow up the surgery, which Lydia refused for several reasons, the main one being that radiation therapy posed a dangerous risk to our unborn child.

Tal moved in with us a few days later. She slept in my old studio, my old room—which was just as well, as I wasn’t painting. I didn’t have the spirit or energy to. We appreciated to no end the advent of her cooking and housekeeping, how it dramatically lightened our burden. Lydia and I had allowed these sorts of pragmatic domestic things to fall into a state of squalid neglect. We almost hadn’t noticed how filthy and cluttered our living space had become until Tal cleaned it up. It was Tal who finally ripped the packing tape off of the flaps of the brown cardboard boxes still stacked up here and there all over the apartment, opened them up and put their contents in their proper places—books on the shelves, clothes in the closets, so on and so forth. She swept and mopped the wood floors and vacuumed the carpets, took out the trash, changed the sheets, did the laundry, washed the dishes, and summarily brought our apartment back into a state of sanity and sanitation, all while Lydia lay languishing, sweaty, naked, and depressed in bed, with her mind on the wane and her womb on the wax, and while I sat around the house uselessly moping in despair.

That’s not quite true. I was useless in other ways, too. I took a lot of long walks that winter, alone, through the neighborhood. I would bundle myself up in disguise, in my oversized green hooded sweatshirt, a scarf wound around my lower face to further hide my apeness, with dark sunglasses to shield my eyes from the blinding snow. Yes, it was winter in Chicago, and in my heart. Oh, hello again, you bitter Chicago winter! How could I have forgotten you? The bastard had come back for us, icing the streets, leadening the sky. And lo, the bile-throated gnashing-mouthed religious zealots on our lawn did not go away, they did not abandon their posts for one minute no matter how low the mercury sank in its thin glass flute: they kept at it, determined as ever in their mission that was from God to annoy and harass us, so steady and steadfast were their little Protestant work ethics, to stand in front of the door to our building in subfreezing temperatures, singing their glorious songs in angelic harmony with eyes lifted piously heavenward between