The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

What she didn't understand, Miriam thought, what she really didn't understand was this stupid cherry on a spoon. The huge sculpture sat there in its lake, its bright red cherry poised happily on the grey spoon-bowl's ridge, a symbol of Minneapolis. What about it excited people? What, exactly, was the point? She sat on the grass by the pond, head tilted upward, mulling it.

Miriam was a museum studies major, although she had started college doing studio art. During that long first year, she spent more time in the art supply store than actually making art. She loved to touch the taught canvases and read the names of all the colors of paints. Ochre seemed to promise sex, cerulean undiscovered planets-every object was expectant, waiting. But when she set up an easel in her room or in class, the brush made primitive, directionless marks, unresponsive to her oblique desire to paint something. In the hours just before an assignment was due, she would chew on the dead ends of her long brown hair or the handles of her wooden brushes. Finally, she understood why someone might throw a bucket of paint over herself and then run hard into a wall one hundred times.

But self-abuse wasn't art.

When she expressed that opinion in her art history seminar-having by then cut her hair into a blunt bob and changed her major-the professor shook his head. "What, then, is art, Miriam?" Allowing a short pause, he then pressed the forward button on the rickety slide machine with greater than usual verve, as if having made his point.

If self abuse was art, Miriam had thought, freshman year of college had been a post-modernist masterpiece of cheap keg beer and dubious sexuality, encapsulated in the nickname that still made some of her old friends laugh. Before learning about "Black-out Sniper," Miriam had never thought about her liaisons buffered by alcohol and darkness as being anything but normal-at least normal within the realm of freshman year. At parties everyone was drunk and looking, scanning dimly lit, crowded rooms with hopeful and later glazed eyes for another pair of eyes with the same idea. Every tasteless poster on her guy friends' walls validated that practice. Beer Goggles, one read, getting ugly people laid for fifty years! She was under no illusions about her appearance, and was in fact more critical of herself than anyone else.

She reminded herself of a painting by Goya; her face pale, eyes big, chin receding just a little, like those inbreed Spanish aristocrats. Arrested by her face, people were often surprised by the solid, almost voluptuous frame that contrasted sharply with the fragile tint of purple under her eyes.

The cartoon man on the poster gave her the thumbs up and smiled, holding his frothing pint out in a gesture of toast. Go for it, he seemed to say. So how could she be doing the wrong thing when, drunk at a party, if she met someone she liked, she stuck with him until the party was dying down, and, if he was willing, took him back to her dorm room? It was true, the guys she picked up usually turned out to be way more intoxicated than her, having proven their manliness by doing beer bongs and 40's, and they rarely remembered her the next day. But that suited Miriam just fine-they had both gotten what they wanted, after all, and it wasn't like anyone was watching.

Or that was what she had thought. As she was leaving a party one Saturday night, a drunk friend grabbed her elbow and whispered, "‘Black-out Sniper.' Get it?" For a moment, she didn't get it. She looked around her, trying to figure out what her friend was talking about. The she turned to look at the boy she was with-his drunkenness was suddenly far more apparent. Miriam felt nauseous as the heat of embarrassment mixed with the alcohol in her stomach. She left the boy standing by the door and fled to her empty dorm room, her eyes burning and itchy from tears she wasn't yet shedding. In the silence of that night, as the alcohol wore off, Miriam's emotions moved from shock and embarrassment to shame to anger and indignation, then back to shame that felt like anger until the emotions couldn't be distinguished. That she should have to feel this shame was more than a betrayal of privacy. It was a betrayal of the mantra, the promise, that had helped her, helped them all, get through high school. The promise that when they got to college, the holding back, the fear of discovery, the claustrophobic family dinner table at which nothing could really be hidden, would be gone. No one would be watching them anymore.

But people were still watching.

Exhausted and still awake as the sun came into her dorm room window, Miriam decided that she was done. Done with college boys who couldn't handle a woman taking what she wanted without becoming a needy mess afterwards; done with girls who called you a whore if you tried. After that party, Miriam stopped hooking up with guys and stopped drinking anything except for good wine. After all, she reasoned, she couldn't be in the art community without learning to like good wine and despise the swill served at openings.

Miriam had left freshman year and the Black-out Sniper behind her, but she was still of the opinion that if you waited for a man to make the move, you would end up watching hundreds of fucking piano concerts and contracting cancer from second hand smoke in shady music venues. That was why she had sat down on Jason's piano bench, and why she had held his hand in the light rail, and why she had finally suggested that they move from the couch to the bed.

Jason. He was probably still sitting in the coffee shop with a stupid look on his face, his forgetful fingers clutching his coffee mug.

Her eyes filled with angry tears and she was back in the sculpture garden.

Big red cherry on a spoon.

Microscopic piece of sludge, pulsing embryo stuck to the inside of her uterus.

She pulled up a clump of grass. Jason played piano at the Guthrie Theater as the rehearsal pianist. He'd been doing it ever since graduating two years earlier and he said it was like playing for an audience with cotton in its ears. No one was ever really listening.

When he wasn't needed at the theater, he played gigs in small cafes that wanted cheap but classy ambiance. Then he could play whatever he liked, as they weren't really listening either. The apartment they shared didn't have a piano, although Miriam had offered to chip in so that they could buy one. Jason insisted that he liked having the separation from his art, or at least that was what he told Miriam if she brought it up over a rare dinner together at home. Miriam almost always had dinner at home, almost always between seven and seven thirty. Working for the Walker Art Center as a public relations lackey, her hours were much more regular than his and home was so near by it seemed stupid to spend money eating out. Their brick apartment squatted-even lurked she sometimes felt-on a small side street ten minutes from the Walker and the Guthrie, the Twin Cities twin assertions of edge in the midst of the Midwestern mild smile.

Sometimes, when Miriam sat at home alone eating, she would wonder what attracted her to Jason. They had met at one of his concerts at Augsburg College her junior and his senior year and she had been struck by his incredible stillness; no matter how rapidly his hands moved across the keyboard, his back was like a lightening rod that contained the energy at his fingertips. What she liked best about him, though, was in his eyes. The other musicians seemed to play on nerves. Miriam would find herself hoping that they wouldn't screw up and embarrass themselves. But with Jason, she never worried; he clearly didn't.

Miriam began actually reading the half sheets of paper that the music department stapled to the campus boards, looking for Jason's name. At the end of the school year, she went to his senior recital and, when it was over, finally talked to him. Unlike the other faces who hovered around the edge of the piano to give their congratulations, she walked up and sat down on the bench beside him. "Hi," she said. "I'm Miriam. You should let me take you out for a drink, to celebrate being done."

His pale blue eyes darted from side to side, as if looking for an escape route and Miriam felt a moment of doubt. He looked smaller beside her than she had expected; was she taller than him? Perhaps all that confidence on stage left him nothing to work with in real life. Miriam worried if, once again, she had been too bold, but it was too late to get out of it, and she never enjoyed backing down was she had gotten up the nerve to do something. So Miriam gave him her best, most reassuring smile, and was relieved, if surprised, when he finally looked her in the eyes and said sure.

"I know the perfect place. They don't check ID's." She sat up a little straighter beside him on the bench, daring him to back out now that he realized she too wasn't a senior. But he just shrugged and began collecting the music off the piano.

The bar that Jason was expecting turned out to be an Indian restaurant. The lights were dim and the tables were only a few inches from the floor, surrounded by a moat with filled with cushions, masquerading as seating. Miriam dropped, gracelessly, into the hole farthest from the door and motioned for him to sit down. She had worn a black spaghetti strapped dress to the recital and it rode up what she considered her slightly-too-ample thighs.

A waiter in a loose fitting shirt, whose dreadlocks protruded from his turban in clumps, came up the table, put down a menu, and smiled at Miriam. She introduced him as her friend Todd. "He can make a ceramic vase that reaches his waist. And he'll let me have a drink." She picked up the menu and looked it over for a moment, before holding it out for Jason. When he didn't take it she began flapping it at him.

"You can order," he said.

She raised her eyebrows slightly and had to stop herself from smiling as she felt an entirely familiar but unexpected sensation-she felt in charge of the situation. Sitting across from her in the pillowed moat, Jason looked like the other musicians sitting behind their pianos. When Todd reemerged twenty minutes later with a bowl full of chicken curry, Jason peered suspiciously at it before finally taking a fork full of chicken. He straightened his chin with two quick jerks-a gesture she would come to recognize as a pre-performance tick-and put it in his mouth.

"Hot," he blurted out, a little fleck of orange sauce clinging to the inner corner of his mouth.

"You are supposed to eat it with your right hand." Miriam dipped her index and middle finger into the portion on her plate and inserted them into her mouth. As Jason watched, she became intensely aware of the gesture, almost choking as she hastily removed her fingers from her mouth again. "It is hot," she coughed.

"I taste ginger, I think. And chili powder."

Miriam wrinkled her forehead at Jason and closed her eyes, tilting her own head to the right and to the left, attempting to find the spices. It was a gesture she would make many more times that night, wondering what Jason was thinking, wondering where the confident man behind the piano was in the boy at the table.

A few weeks later, Jason graduated. Miriam, with one year left, went to as many of Jason's small shows as she could, becoming familiar with the warren of cafes that covered the cities. Without ever really talking about it, they were "together"-a loose, fluid construct that distance aided by creating space. Space for Jason from Miriam and space for Miriam from the insular world of college. Having a boyfriend distanced her like nothing else had from her freshman year nickname, and going into the city on weekends made her feel like she was already moving on from the world where that name had had any power at all.

After Miriam's own graduation, she moved into Jason's apartment and they had sex twice a week. Miriam was proud of this healthy-seeming statistic, although the regularity of it worried her sometimes. Would it be better, one week, not to have sex at all, just for the thrill of recovering their passion the next? But Jason had his habits, his days in front of the piano touching nothing but ivory for hours. To come back home to bed with her, what would her skin feel like after so much slick surface? The noises she made could hardly be as beautiful as the ones his fingers usually elicited. So it was good that on the days he took off from extensive practice, for the sake of distance as he said so many times, he came home for dinner and brought her closer.

Maybe if she had thought about it more, the distance would have bothered her. But when she did sit in the apartment eating dinner alone, thinking, the patterns and textures of their live together were almost as comforting as paint colors or the art canon. So when Miriam had missed her period, she didn't say anything. She went on having sex twice a week. She organized a publicity event for a collection of pots, fine examples of Ming dynasty porcelain, tributes to a masterful touch. After a few weeks, when routine didn't bring a return to routine, Miriam bought a pregnancy test and a six pack of paper towels. They had been meaning to buy paper towels for days. And while Miriam sat, eating her dinner of salad and soy patty, the plastic strip already in the trash can, she wondered if the small piece of goop attached to the inside of her uterus was enjoying it with her. If it would enjoy the carrots or beets or the classical music playing in the background on NPR. It was late and Jason was still at some café, playing the last leg of a Saturday night show. She sat on their couch the rest of the night, eventually falling asleep.

In the morning, they went to their ritual Sunday breakfast at a café down the street. After picking at her eggs for a while-conversation a labored, lurching chore-she blurted it out. "We're pregnant," she said, sitting up straighter as she had on the piano bench, willing defiance into her pose, daring him to say something.

"What are you going to do?" he finally asked. his curiosity seeming so genuine she wanted to slap her.

"What am I going to do! What are we going to do, Jason."

"Right. I meant what are we going to do."

"I have no fucking idea, Jason." The way she kept saying his name at the end of her sentences seemed to make him intensely uncomfortable. Good, she thought, as she watched thoughts run through his head, absorbing her news. His coffee mug had a crack down the outside and he reached out to touch it, drawing his eyebrows together into a crease over his hooked nose. She couldn't imagine what he was thinking, making it even more absurd to think about "them" being pregnant. As if together they would start to vomit in the morning, swell like ticks and crave strange combinations-tuna salad and ice cream, steak and yogurt-then, finally, splash, crown, release. A mess of placebo covered chaos would come screaming forward into life.

"I've always supported a woman's right to choose," he finally mumbled.

"Which means what? That I have to choose and you get to sit there and watch?"

Jason didn't respond. He started to play the C scale on the table cloth and refused to make eye contact. It seemed to Miriam like his way of saying, exactly. Of saying, you've always taken the lead. So take the lead. I'll play the piano very well.

"I have chosen. I'm going to get an abortion." She ground the words out. Then she added, "And I'm not going to marry you, so don't get some stupid chivalric idea and bother asking." Miriam picked her purse up and pushed her chair back so hard that it fell over. The clatter caused the café to get quiet for a moment and Miriam was conscious of the tears in her eyes welling into tears down her cheeks. The look on Jason's face was like a deer in the headlights. A fisherman blinded by the beam from the lighthouse. "And don't tell anyone, either," she hissed, then turned on her heel and walked quickly out the door, leaving Jason to pick up the chair.

When Miriam got back the apartment that night, after hours of doing nothing except stare at the spoon in the sculpture garden, she found that Jason wasn't home yet. She sat on the couch and stared at the blank television screen, her hand on her stomach. The stranger inside Miriam startled her again and again. It was almost as if she kept forgetting she was pregnant. Her mind darted to what she could make for dinner, what should she eat and what did she want to eat, had it gotten colder outside today, or was she just imagining fall coming? And where was Jason? His name was like movement just beyond her peripheral vision, it made her turn her head as if she was looking for something. As if the piece of muck he had helped to create, the bundle of change inside her, would come to the door like an uninvited guess.

Staring at their closed door, she thought perhaps her nervous ticks were just the noises she kept hearing or imagining, waiting for Jason to come home.

Tiny piece of muck. That was all it really was. And maybe the stupid spoon was really just a stupid spoon. Maybe that was the mystery. Maybe the muck was just muck. She would get an abortion, even though her mother hadn't. In the hours she had spent on the couch the night before, Miriam had kept returning to her mother's face. The profoundly tired expression she got when she was disappointed in Miriam or worried about something that was probably Miriam's fault; she wanted too many lessons, too many clothes, and too many rides in their gas guzzling mini-van. What would she say when Miriam told her the news? In her mind, Miriam had rehearsed her expression when she defiantly announced her pregnancy before the duel audience of her mother and Jason. She had told them she would of course take responsibility for it, the strange, soon to be sentient consequence of sex on only birth control. If Jason felt vaguely resentful, Miriam felt furious. She, lucky number one out of one hundred, stuck with this thing, this it. It. Yet gender was already encoded in its genes, an entire personality wound up tight like a golf ball. A golf ball that would soon be a volleyball. She shuddered in revulsion as she thought about the uncontrollable changes, the stretch marks on her thighs.

But she wouldn't need to tell her mother, now that she had decided to just get rid of it. As if it could really be gotten rid of. Unwilling to begin that circle of thought again, Miriam forced herself to get up off the couch and go into the kitchen to look for something to eat. Her will to cook, to chop vegetables or sauté the fish she had bought, was gone.

She opened the fridge and pulled out a vanilla yogurt, the only thing that didn't need preparation. When she opened the cupboard to get some granola out to mix into it, she saw Jason's bag of Ruffles. All the food in the apartment was shared, at least technically, but Miriam and Jason still rarely touched one another's purchases. On an impulse that felt like the phrase fuck you, she picked up the bag of chips instead of the granola and took it and her yogurt back to the couch.

Miriam ate the yogurt first, methodically and without really tasting it, and then ripped open the bag of chips with a satisfying screech of plastic. As she brought chips from her fingers to her mouth in satisfying clumps, she wondered why she hadn't eaten potato chips in so long. The grease of them inhabited the entire cavity of her mouth.

There was no other way to describe it than sexual, since it was the only word she had for such strong physical pleasure. Being responsible, she thought, resisting, wasn't worth it. Here she was anyway, pregnant and eating potato chips. Wondering how she had gotten to this couch from the piano bench at the concert so long ago, she thought of how she and Jason used to argue over the story of how they met. Jason always said that he hadn't been nearly as awkward as she insisted on remembering. He tried to point out that any true musician would be startled by someone invading his performance space so soon after a difficult piece! And he didn't usually eat oriental food. But he always came off sounding petulant, his soft voice was drowned out by the enthusiasm of her storytelling, the vivid detail of her own memory. Still, no matter how many times Miriam told the story, she never could explain why he had agreed. Maybe she just didn't want to admit to herself that his sure had been more submission than consent. Another victory-victim-for the Black-out Sniper.

Suddenly, she wanted to be drunk. To be drunk the way she had been freshman year; so drunk she couldn't think straight or see herself or anyone else clearly. She went back into the kitchen and surveyed their alcohol supply. In the cupboard were two bottles of red wine Jason had got from his parents and a nearly empty bottle of whiskey left over from a party. Miriam picked up the whiskey. It was Jameson, better than she was used to, but it still burned as it went down in a few gulps. Then she picked up the bottles of red wine. She didn't know how much it would take her to get drunk after so many years mostly abstaining.

As she was putting the bottle opener in her pocket, she remembered that women weren't supposed to drink when they were pregnant. She laughed a laugh that that she nearly choked on-it was devoid of mirth and hurt coming up. Let's kill it tonight, she thought, so I can't change my mind. Then she grabbed a sweater and headed out the door without stopping to think who the second person in her us might be.

When Jason finally did come home, it was to find a half-eaten bag of potato chips lying on the table in a dark apartment.

Sitting at her desk in the empty Walker several hours later, the neck of the wine bottle firmly in her grip, Miriam realized the point of the cherry on the spoon. It was the first bite of an ice cream sundae! The enormous spoon, the red cherry as shiny as a booth in a 50's dinner, the happy little fucking children all around it all day long on endless art field trips-how had she not seen it before? Too rigid, she thought, too rigid. But now she felt light as a feather, free and floating. She hadn't even needed to open the second bottle of wine. The whiskey and the first bottle had done it.

Smiling as she thought about the cherry on a spoon, Miriam got out all of her Sharpies-the rainbow connection, as she called them, twelve different colors-from her desk drawer. At first she began to draw on computer paper, but the scope was so limited! Looking around, she decided she would do a mural. She sat down in front of the white wall, and began to draw. Not anything particular, not with a plan. Each color just seemed so bright, so beautiful. She drew a stick woman holding hands with a stick man and then drew in a tree next to them like a cotton candy, which she choose to make blue with a red trunk. Little kids must feel this way, she thought, when they draw those god-awful pictures that parents then have to put on their refrigerators to prove how much they like them.

Miriam kept drawing until she had Sharpied every inch of wall she could reach without actually getting up any farther than her knees. Then she rolled over onto her side, drew her knees into her chest, and pulled the now empty wine bottle parallel with her eyes. On the label, a small yellow kite blew in an invisible breeze, a gale, maybe, that was also moving the floor beneath her. She was so drunk that when she began to cry she didn't hold anything back; she simply gulped and yelped as the air pumped her lungs like a bellow. She cried until she fell asleep.

When she awoke in the morning, a pair of shoes was next to the picture of the kite. Her boss, in a sharp black pant suit, stared down at her at a loss for words. Miriam sat up and pressed her hair to her head. Everything hurt and her eyes were gummy.

"I'm pregnant," she said. There seemed to be no other explanation.

Noting the empty wine bottle, her boss asked, "Should you be drinking?"

"Should I be pregnant?" Miriam laughed hollowly.

The other woman pursed her lips. "You should go home." Then her face softened a little bit, like she was having a memory of her own. She looked to her side, at the wall. "We'll get that painted over," she said.

For a moment, Miriam didn't know what she was talking about. Then she saw her work of the night before; demented stick figures, trees, great swirls of wind. And in the center, a sundae with twelve different colors of ice cream, the top scoop green and slightly indented, from where someone had taken the cherry off the top.