I Brought You into This World and I Can Take You Out of It Too: Part 1
Some fiction, in case you hate my nonfiction
Note: My partner has been a vegetarian his entire life. His parents are vegetarians and they raised him as one, and he’s simply remained one as an adult. While generally, these days, vegetarianism isn’t thought of as especially novel, there’s something about his inborn vegetarianism that fascinates people. Has he really, truly, never eaten meat, people want to know? (No, he tried pepperoni pizza at a sleepover once). Is he horrified by non-vegetarians? What about oysters? What about lab-grown meat? And what’s his family’s deal: is it a religious thing? Some of the fascination probably comes from the fact that he’s impulsive and lively and not at all self-righteous: not, I think, most people’s image of an adult male vegetarian. I wrote this story a few years ago—spurred, I guess, by others’ surprise, their assumptions, their followup questions for him. At the risk of sounding obnoxious, I think it’s some of the best fiction I’ve written, or at least the fiction I most enjoyed writing. It’s also too long for most lit mags, so I’m just going to publish it here, in a few installments.
I Brought You into This World and I Can Take You Out of It Too
1. This Is Why You Take Her Swimming on The First Date
During his last oyster season, I’d try and make him eat one. They literally don’t have a nervous system, I’d say.
As I coaxed, he’d start to waver. I did not let him see how that wavering electrified me. This was a chase, a will-he-won’t-he. It had been a long time since there was chasing between Gideon and me. But, when he told his dad on their weekly phone call that he might eat an oyster, the idea was shot down. Later, I wished Gideon had eaten just one of them. If he had, I felt, he would have lived.
Our college friends all flew down to Georgia for the funeral and I luxuriated in their sympathy. I sat next to my roommate Sofia except for when I stood to give my stupid little eulogy. A high school friend of Gideon’s spoke after me. Gideon cared for every living thing, the friend said, in his thick Southern accent. He was a lifelong vegetarian, and never showed up without a box of veggie burgers. I thought this was an insane thing to say. Surely teenage Gideon hadn’t just walked around with a box of Boca burgers. Still, when the friend said that I heard a cry. I felt Sofia’s hand caress my back, and understood the cry had come from me.
For a few hours right after Gideon died, he was mine and mine alone. Then those hours ended, and we began to build a new version of him together. We built it out of eulogies, bad poems, Instagram captions. In this version of Gideon we built, his vegetarianism grew in prominence. It symbolized him, and nothing makes someone seem more dead than being symbolized.
Gideon’s parents were vegetarians too. This was why he’d been one in the first place. But nobody seemed to give them any credit for it, even though his mom was basically a full-time professional vegetarian. That was, I think, because they had stopped eating animals by choice. By the time they stopped, they were adults, and it was too late for them. They had been soiled by childhoods of shrimp lo mein and fried chicken. Gideon, given no choice in the matter, had left the earth as unblemished as the day he was born. Many mourners seemed to find this fact not only beautiful or touching, but a downright relief, as if Gideon’s life had been a nail-biting race against the monster of carnivorism and he’d just barely beaten the monster across the finish line.
The high school friend’s eulogy made me feel like a pervert. So did the other eulogies, and the poems, and all the rest. I felt like a pervert because I wished he’d lived rather than died, and I wished he’d eaten that oyster. I wanted him back, impure but alive instead of dead and perfect. Sometimes I even imagined being his oyster as it squeezed past the ridges of his throat. I imagined molding my briny clump of a self to fit between his two tonsils.
The other reason I felt like a pervert was because I still remembered him fucking me, and remembered it fondly. The hair on his stomach used to sweep over my back, and his breath would tingle on my ear. I understood that the new Gideon articulated in the eulogies, including my own, did not fuck. After his not-eating-meat, his not-fucking might have been his most important attribute. It wasn’t my preference, but I wasn’t going to fight consensus. After all, I have always been a people-pleaser (too much so, Gideon would say). It was the people-pleasing that made me say things to him like Use me and Do whatever you want with me, please. But there I go again.
It may feel scary to realize you’ll keep growing and changing while your lost loved one remains frozen in time, Griefguru told me through my phone screen. But strange as it may seem, your relationship will continue to deepen and change. This did not seem strange to me at all. Our relationship had indeed changed a lot recently. Not because of me, but because of Gideon, who had gone from being alive—which was how he’d been when I fell in love with him—to being dead. This is why you take her swimming on the first date, I found myself thinking whenever I pictured his bloody, mangled corpse.
He was completely different when dead. Alive, he’d been brash and I’d been meek. He used to come to my suite just to squabble with Sofia. “Putting a child on a leash is basically the same as putting them in a stroller,” he’d said once, walking out of the bathroom. Sofia slammed her laptop shut to argue. After a while I’d squeak, “Aren’t you two actually really saying the same thing?” Now he was no longer brash.
I sat up in bed and whined, I feel like everyone’s missing you for the wrong reasons. One of Griefguru’s videos said it was helpful to speak out loud to your lost loved one. Gideon didn’t answer me, but I heard a replying whine from the floorboards in the hall. One of his parents was having a sleepless night too. I turned out the light, but Mo and Amy’s farmhouse was the only place I’d ever slept where the moonlight could keep you awake.
2. My Little Carrot Is All Grown Up
I didn’t even have to book a plane ticket for Gideon’s funeral. I already had one to visit at the end of the month. I even thought, this time, Gideon’s mom might put me on her Instagram. It was meant to be my second trip to the farm, though Gideon hadn’t come to New Orleans once. I always stopped just short of inviting him.
I didn’t invite him because I had a fantasy to preserve. In the fantasy Gideon sat at my mother’s newspaper-covered kitchen table. I’d dump a bag of boiled crawfish in front of him, and my friends would teach him how to peel them. But I knew the fantasy wouldn’t happen. It made me sick to think about Gideon sitting in a restaurant, picking over some cornbread and saying, “Just order fried oysters, Zoe,” and “Don’t worry about me, this is delicious.” Plus, next to Mo and Amy’s farmhouse he’d find my home small, my mother’s accent stupid, her diet carnivorous. So I scheduled more visits to his family.
Gideon told me he’d swiped right because my bio said I was from Louisiana. “Another Southerner in exile,” he’d said. But Georgia had been a photobooth backdrop for his childhood, and the foods of the place had been kept far away from his thin photographable body.
Before my first time at the farm, last Christmas, I’d studied not just Amy’s Instagram but also the archives of her old blog. I’d skulked by the cookbooks at our campus bookstore, skipping the recipes but memorizing anecdotes sprinkled into The Veggie Momma Cookbook and Abundance: Plant-Based Meals from My Family to Yours. I knew the whole @VeggieMomma story. How she met a handsome vegan hippie, ditched a bacon-egg-and-cheese-packed career as a Manhattan art director, and moved to a farm in the Blue Ridge mountains to raise her only son the way our fragile planet intended.
On day two of that first Christmastime visit, Amy asked Gideon and I to help in the vegetable garden. She sat on the farmhouse’s back steps with her camera on her knees, studying us as we messed with carrots and beets. The cold scraped our faces pink. By the time Amy posted any of those pictures, I’d gone back to my mom’s house for the last days of the break. The picture she chose was of Gideon waving a carrot in the air with the mountains rising behind him. I’d been beside him struggling with an onion, but I’d been cropped out. Cleverly, Amy had paired this picture of Gideon with an older one—one I’d seen before, because it was among the very first Amy had put on her old Veggie Momma blog. The old picture showed Gideon at seven or eight with long eyelashes, clutching a carrot. She captioned it, “My little carrot is all grown up! Winter carrot-lentil stew for hungry little ones, and big ones too, is at the link in my bio.”
I didn’t mind, about being cropped. When we were first dating, Gideon flew home for a weekend to do a promo shoot. Before he left he had me measure him all over and write down the measurements, which he then emailed to his mom’s assistant so she could get him seasonal clothes for the shoot. He’d gained a few pounds since we got together, he said, kissing me as I wound the tape measure around his waist. All of which is to say, I understood. There were assistants and emails involved here. A new girlfriend couldn’t just appear.
But I thought maybe I’d have a chance the second time I visited. Gideon and I had been together almost three years, and my dry wintertime skin would be more photogenic in July. Me and my high school friends went to Goodwill a few days before I was supposed to leave. They bought crop tops and bike shorts. I got a white linen smock, a straw hat, and two chunky cardigans. Roya said I looked like her sister’s piano teacher. Margot, whose cousins lived in north Georgia, said people would think I was weird, and the red dirt would stain my white clothes. But I wasn’t going to north Georgia, really, because Mo and Amy and Gideon didn’t live in Georgia. They lived in a painstakingly constructed fantasy, and these clothes would look perfect there. I imagined myself photographed from behind, wearing my cardigan as I stepped out into a dewy mountain dawn.
We had stuffed our bags into Roya’s trunk and crammed into the backseat when Amy called me. I didn’t even have her number saved. At first, I didn’t understand what she was telling me.
No no no, I said, No.
We don’t know where he was driving, Amy kept saying. She said it again and again as if, by finding the answer, we could bring back Gideon.
When did it happen? My words slid out like change from a vending machine.
Around noon.
You should have called me sooner.
My friends were looking fearfully from one another to me, mouthing I don’t know and Someone died? I remember seeing Roya turn the car on, then change her mind and pull the key from the ignition.
The funeral is Monday, Amy said.
Monday. I’ll see you then. I’m sorry.
Amy hung up. Take me home, I told Roya.
I wanted my mom. I wanted Gideon. From under a crushing weight I thought, stupidly, that this might be my chance to bond with Amy. I was sure she’d always found me girly and gluttonous. This would bring us together.
But it no longer mattered. She wasn’t my boyfriend’s mom anymore. She wasn’t anything to me now.
3. The House Would Be Too Empty
In the church after the ceremony, Sofia clutched my hand like I was an old woman. Amy walked over, gathering her red curls up into a ponytail.
Zoe, would you consider changing your flight?
What? said Sofia.
What? I said.
Don’t leave tomorrow. You can stay with Mo and I for a few weeks, and you’ll just fly back up to school from here, said Amy.
I don’t know, I said. I’m so sad. I might be too sad to be away from home.
We’ll pay your mom to ship your things to school, she said. The house would be too empty with just me and Mo.
I wondered if Amy found my family incomplete. Maybe she suspected, correctly, that my mother and I lived in a house right off I-10 where I’d eaten chicken nuggets off plastic plates. And her home had an empty antique chair I could fill. That’s how, when the fanfare of the funeral ended, I wound up alone in Gideon’s childhood bed scrolling Griefguru posts.
I was afraid of Gideon’s parents, his father’s sadness so boundless it felt like enthusiasm, his mother businesslike. We weren’t hungry. Amy, especially, never ate more than a few bites. But meals were the only thing that gave shape to our days. So we’d take Mo’s car down the dirt road and eat at one of the three restaurants in town. We never used to eat out, Amy said plaintively in the car, But I just can’t cook. Mo kissed her hand. He drove along the outskirts, avoiding the intersection where his son had died. At each restaurant we’d all order the one vegetarian dish on the menu.
4. Rearrange My Guts
The night before we each flew home for the summer, Gideon and I went to the nice restaurant off-campus with jars of baby’s breath on the tables. We didn’t know it was our last date.
You should get the braised ox cheek, he said.
I asked why.
Just sounds interesting. Ox cheek! He enunciated like the words were new, then leaned over the table to kiss me.
I asked why he was always telling me to order things he wouldn’t eat. He said one of us might as well get it.
No, I want to get the Brassica Bowl. That way we can share.
Get the ox cheek, Zoe.
He almost growled it. I got the ox cheek. When our waiter came, he handed me the vegetables and gave Gideon craggy islands of meat floating in sauce. We swapped. This always happened when Gideon chose my food. Gideon liked to exercise a little control over what went into me. With a command, he’d change the materials I was made of. Rearrange my guts, as they say. By the time we went home I’d be made up of ingredients he wouldn’t eat himself, but had chosen to build me out of. It made me feel thrillingly loose, as if I didn’t have a name.
Of course, that sort of thing didn’t happen in front of his parents. When they’d come to visit a month before, we went to the same restaurant. We each ordered either the sweet potato gnocchi or the brassica bowl, and Gideon hadn’t told me not to.
Brilliant. This line gripped me in particular: "I wanted him back, impure but alive instead of dead and perfect."