Patching Holes with Spackle
Naomi Leigh
Mina’s favorite part about skipping school as a kid was cuddling up on the living room couch and putting Divorce Court on the TV. Back then it was still Judge Lynn Toler and her signature short chunky necklaces and short side swept hair and short patience for bullshit on the stand. The most intense cases were always the ones where the husband and wife would argue over what to do with things—the car note, the gold jewelry, the six acres of investment property, the kids.
It was only now in early adulthood that it occurred to Mina that most breakups didn’t really go like that. It wasn’t so much about the things but the lack of them, the missing presence felt in empty spaces. As she surveyed the rubble of her now half-abandoned apartment, she saw Brianna everywhere amid the vast expanse of nothingness. She was in the blank segments of beige walls where only scribbled pencil marks and small nail holes—holes that Mina dared not sand away and fill with spackle—offered any indication that they once held canvasses of memories in brilliant blue and green and white—Brianna’s dress was so white that day it eclipsed the black cliffs of Newport. She was in the now tilted bookshelf where each row was just a few books too short and the remaining ones, which once stood proudly upright pressed against one another in no particular order, now leaned limp to the side like dominoes about to cascade. Conspicuously absent was Simeon Wade’s Foucault in California (“I know you hate philosophy but it’s not philosophy baby, it’s accessible! They’re just tripping in the desert and talking about stuff,”, Bri had urged), Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment (“All those inconvenient questions women ask ourselves even when we know we shouldn’t dare”), and Pride and Prejudice (“Honestly, Mina, it’s just fucking funny, I swear!”) She was in the linoleum floor, now clean, but which was once lined with shattered plates, bowls, cups—whatever Mina could get her hands on, whatever might have made enough noise when it made contact with the kitchen floor to drown out of the sound of Bri walking out and the door slamming closed behind her. Of course, Mina knew that nothing was loud enough to replace the conversation that replayed at full volume again and again in her head and in Bri’s too about the things two women wanted from one another but could never give.
“It’s just…not how I pictured it when I was a little girl,” Bri once confessed to her after yet another fight. “I used to imagine candlelit bedrooms, you know? But now all I’m ever thinking of is turkey basters and test tubes in fluorescent white rooms.”
But mostly, Bri was burrowing in the empty crevices of Mina’s mind, waiting to fill the silence—sometimes for hours but usually just for minutes—with the inescapability of her scent and her dirty blonde curls and her moles she insisted were only freckles. In the months that followed Mina took her first attempt at filling those spaces, with the help of three lovers. Their names were Reggie, Oren, and Lis.
Reggie’s Raya said he was 49—but it also said his name was Reginald, and as far as Mina could tell it had been years since either of those were accurate descriptors for the divorcé with his disheveled greyish hair that was once strawberry blond or his golf polos rife with holes. Reggie was a commodities trader at UBS, which meant each morning he’d disappeared to work before Mina woke up—“market’s calling, darling” and every day at 4 p.m. she’d get a text as the closing bell sounded—“Home?” Reggie didn’t talk much about himself, which Mina chalked up to an old-school masculine aversion to self-analysis, and which she didn’t mind because it allowed her to fill their conversations with talk of her cooking and her budding career and the latest drama among her friends. Most importantly, Reggie was fun. It was fun when he carried her from the couch to the bed, when he was just a little rougher than the guys her own age, when he couldn’t help but crack at a joke at his own age’s expense after—“Once you go grey, every other guy is gay!” It stopped being fun when one day he arrived later than usual which he chalked up to a client dinner, until Mina saw the gold band around his finger. “Come on honey, I mean—you obviously knew, right?” he pleaded. But she didn’t know, and she felt stupid and pathetic and lonelier than ever.
Oren had lies, too—he fashioned himself a “Judeo-Bolshevik” and an artist, both of which sounded more glamorous or at least more interesting than being a bartender and part-time Lower East Side gallery assistant who, after a few lines, went on long monologues about MI6 and the CIA and the World Bank, and sometimes Zionists if he had a couple extra. Mina found his rants tolerable if a bit boring until he accused her of being “petit bourgeoisie” after she tuned him out in favor of Instagram. “At least you think I’m petite!” she hurled back at him, giggling. But they spent many days and nights together, and whatever his bluster about chivalry being another form of male chauvinism that condescends women, he was generous in and out of bed and he did love bringing her little gifts. After she lamented that she was out of setting spray, he showed up with three two-liter spray bottles shoved into his backpack—“Sephora was having a sale, 3 for $0, can you believe it?” He drew her a pastel painting of a Coptic cross, a small but meaningful nod to her heritage that almost felt like meeting the family. But when she hung it up, the cross lined up too cleanly with the nail holes behind it and she swore she could almost see them bleeding through the off-white canvas, so she decided that such a crucifixion was all too Catholic in aesthetic sensibilities and kept it next to her bed instead. It stayed there even after Oren’s other lover decided that she was done sharing him.
And then there was Lis. Her hair wasn’t quite as curly as Bri’s, but the bridge of her nose was coated in freckles and Mina loved the way they stretched nearly to her eyes when she smiled hard, which was often. They met at a S.L.A.A. meeting on the Upper West and Lis joked that even saying they met on Wednesday at the Woods would be less embarrassing than the truth—they had exchanged glances then numbers in between stories of middle-aged sex addicts sabotaging decades of marriage for little deaths with strangers. At home, they roleplayed domesticity together. It made Mina smile when Lis called the apartment “home” even though they hadn’t moved in together. But after all, Lis did have a set of keys, and whoever got home from work first took to cooking, greeting the later arrival with smells of garlic and shallots and chamomile tea. Lis was a dog sitter, and sometimes they’d take snowy laps around the neighborhood walking the dogs together, burrowing their arms in each other’s sweatshirts as Lis pointed out glowingly how pretty everything was—the Christmas lights, the single-family homes they couldn’t afford, the dogs, and of course themselves. And sure, it was just roleplaying—Mina knew it wasn’t the real thing. But Mina loved playing house since she was a little girl. Besides, sometimes playing pretend helped her to remember and to forget, at least until Lis moved to San Francisco and they promised to write letters but never did.
Still, Mina checked her mailbox each day on her way home from work for those first few weeks and found nothing but tax forms and medical bills and local candidate vouchers, all of which she tossed out. And one afternoon, after performing that routine several dozen times, the winter had passed and Mina realized it was time for a change.
So that day, Mina breezed past the mailbox and went to the neighborhood dog park instead. There were benches interspersed just outside the park’s perimeter, slightly elevated relative to the sunken park, allowing Mina to watch the pups play from a safe distance. At this point, Mina was familiar with the park’s usual suspects. A spotted Border Collie sprinted laps along the park’s edge—that was Scooter—and a particularly poofy Chow Chow was lying down in a prone position as her owner desperately pleaded with her to get up—none other than Cinnamon, of course. But that day Mina noticed a new visitor had made its debut at the park. A sleek black Doberman—or perhaps it was a Rottweiler whose ears had just perked up—sprinted to its owner, a stocky olive-skinned man of perhaps 35 in a fur-trimmed puffer jacket. Next to him was a woman with a similar coat, although hers was cinched at the waist and the fur hood was pulled over her head. But when she turned around, suddenly her dirty blonde curls, which were tucked into the hood, came into perfect view. And despite the jacket’s cinch, the outline of her baby bump had nowhere to hide. Their eyes met from across the park, and both strained a smile as they met in the middle, just the two of them, after the woman whispered something to her man that Mina couldn’t quite make out.
“Mina,” Bri hummed with a slight smile, her voice as mellow and smooth as ever. “You look great.”
“Bri, I—you look…,” Mina’s voice trailed off as she gestured to Bri’s stomach.
“Big?” Mina laughed, breaking the tension. “They say month seven is when the weight starts really taking its toll on your lower back.”
“I was going to say you look beautiful.”
“Well, thanks—I sure don’t feel it. How’s work been? How’s the apartment? Are you still there?” Bri asked.
“It’s good. The hot water still cuts out on me, but…” Mina’s voice trailed off. “But it’s, I mean it’s what you always wanted, right?”
“Cold water?” Bri giggled, trying to break the tension again, but this time it was futile and Mina could hear her voice crack. “No, yeah. It’s—Chester’s really good for me. He treats me really well. I know he’s gonna be great.”
“You’ll be the best mom, Bri.”
The two women embraced, although Bri’s stomach kept their hug at an awkward arm’s length, arms barely reaching around one another’s backs and their many layers negated the possibility of anything approaching skin contact.
“And Mina—just please know I’m sorry about the things I said. I hope you can understand that I just—”
Mina cut her off, shaking her head as she scrunched here face nonchalantly. “I don’t even remember.”
After they said their goodbyes, Mina turned around but instead of heading home she took a right walked into the home improvement shop two blocks east. She perused the dimly lit aisles, picked out spackle and a drywall sanding sponge, then completed her walk home. Once inside she sighed, surveyed for the final time the spotted pencil markings which lined the walls, and then she began to work.
Naomi Leigh is a NYC-based writer of mostly short fiction and essays. She loves playing tennis, drawing with charcoal, and you!