Rita Bullwinkel

I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome. 

There was a period of my life in which my primary source of income came from being a piece of furniture. I worked for a business that sold sofas that cost over six times what I was paid in a year. The showroom was on the twenty-fourth floor of a beautiful modern building in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. There was no storefront. It was a word-of-mouth business. If you were rich enough, you knew about it. The clients were Saudi princes looking to spend $80,000 on a dining table; creative directors of high-end fashion companies looking to overhaul their runway seating, buy a million or two million dollars’ worth of luxury benches; hobbled old Upper East Side women redesigning their Hampton homes, budgets of five million and up just to acquire objects, things to fill the spaces they already owned.

A big floor-to-ceiling stainless-steel door opened from the hallway into the show space. Inside the show space were several interiors configurations—dining rooms and living rooms and bedrooms set up on circles of carpet—living quarters that in real life would have been divided but here, in the showroom, were smashed up against each other without any walls. And on the other side of the imaginary rooms, just below the big windows, was me, at a long grand desk, in a pencil skirt.

My father told me that our church had a belly. It was named nave and sat at the very center of the cross, in the meat where the two structural lines crossed. I never saw anyone feed the nave and feared it was hungry. When we went to church I brought it things I thought it would like. I stuffed almonds in my pockets and gummy bears in the backs of my shoes. I whispered things to the floor, sure that the nave could hear me. I said, “I know you must be hungry because all the adults bring you is money.”

I pulled my profferings out and stuck them under the rug and mashed them up a bit with my foot so the nave wouldn’t have to chew. I brought it raisins and cereal and sometimes even honey. I hid the food in my jacket and when the adults weren’t looking, I fed the ravenous nave like my parents fed me.

I always sat in the same seat because I liked the smell of the rot the nave gave me. No other children would sit next to me, and my parents did not like that I sat alone. After several weeks the adults began to sniff and told me the place where I sat was stinky. 

“I am having private time with God,” I lied to them. I knew I had made the nave too dependent. I knew that if I didn’t feed the nave, I would be the nave’s next feed.