Courtney Zoffness - Spilt Milk

PRAISE FOR SPILT MILK

I dont know what I love most about Courtney Zoffnesss Spilt Milk. The taut originality of the prose? The acuity of its insights? The daring vulnerability? There are so many things I want to say about Spilt Milk, but, honestly, theyre all variations of This is fucking brilliant. Whatever you think this book is, its more. A debut writer this talented and skilled is an event in itself.

Mat Johnson, author of Pym

Gentle, playful, and laced with subtle wit, these essays are a welcome balm in an insane and un-gentle time.

Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior and This Is Pleasure

Courtney Zoffness is a gorgeous writer with that rarest of qualities: heart. Spilt Milk contains the wisdom of a mother, the maturity of an older sister, and the wide-eyed wonder of a small child. Its a magical gift of a collection.

Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

These bright, knowing essays spill over with intelligence and wit. Courtney Zoffness traces the dizzying conflict faced by parentsthe daily ricochet between burden and joyand, with a sharply lyric voice, discovers hidden connections between this domestic struggle and the larger cultural and political winds shifting around us.

Ben Marcus, author of Notes from the Fog

On one level, Spilt Milk is an extraordinary exploration of the connectionssmall and large, real and imaginedbetween childhood and parenthood. On another level, its irrefutable proof that Courtney Zoffness is a wondrous calculus of a prose writer: keen, inventive, candid, charitable, not to mention one helluva stylist.

Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math

Wry and masterful, Spilt Milk examines the multiplicities of self and culture, asking the tough questions with remarkable concision. Courtney Zoffness is a writer of supernatural acuity and wit.

T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Spilt Milk is current, self-examining, self-aware, honest, insightful, biting, and funny. Essentially, its a perfect book.

Jesse Eisenberg, actor and author of Bream Gives Me Hiccups and Other Stories

Courtney Zoffnesss collection is written with a fierce and often funny honesty. Zoffness explores motherhood and daughterhood and how these early attachments make us and unmake us, how they connect us to othersuntil they are us.

Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

In these ten musical, open-hearted essays, Courtney Zoffness establishes herself as one of our most soulful, clear-eyed narrators. A lucid dream of a book I wished would never end.

Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

SPILT MILK

Copyright 2021 by Courtney Zoffness

Versions of some essays in this book first appeared in the following: Hot for Teacher in Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement; Holy Body in the Southern Review; It May All End in Aleppo in Arts & Letters; Black Forest, as Up in the Trees, in Indiana Review; Trespass, as Spilt Milk, in the Paris Reviews the Daily.

All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

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ISBN: 978-1-952119-14-9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.mcsweeneys.net

Printed in Canada

SPILT
MILK

MEMOIRS

COURTNEY ZOFFNESS

This is a work of nonfiction. Events and experiences detailed herein have been faithfully rendered according to the authors memory, to the best of her ability. Some names, physical descriptions, and other identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy and anonymity of individuals involved.

CONTENTS

A mame hot oygen fun gloz.

(A mother has eyes of glass.)

Yiddish proverb

If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.

Ocean Vuong

For Jeremy

THE ONLY THING
WE HAVE TO FEAR

HERE IS MY OLDEST son, age five, at not quite 6 a.m.:

I cant go to school! His eyes are wild, lidless.

I wrench out the worry like a splinter: His schoolmates have learned new things and he wont be able to follow. Weve been out of town. He has missed Mondays class.

I rub his back, offer reassurances. Maybe youll feel better after breakfast, I say.

When I head to the kitchen, he slams his bedroom door, bars himself inside. Dont make me go!

Mommy and Daddy would never suggest you do something thats a bad idea, I sayand wonder if its true.

He barely removes the thumb from his mouth as I pull a shirt over his head. I lure him out of the house with a lollipop. Midway into the six-minute walk, his panic mounts.

What time is it? he says. Am I late? He takes off down the sidewalk.

Honey, youre not late, I call. I catch up with him at the intersection, a network of strollers and scooters and clasped hands. He is doubled over.

I have to poop, he says.

Schools across the street. Well go to the second-floor bathroom, I say.

No, he screams, and stamps his feet. He is wearing light-up shoes.

We drift upstairs with the crowd, and I report him present to his teacher while he twists beside me in visceral discomfort. He agrees to use the toilet only if I wait outside the bathroom, but any relief I feel over this deal dissipates when he reemerges seconds later, pants at his ankles.

I dont have to go anymore, he says, zipping up his fly.

Are you sure? Want to just sit for a minute and see?

I cant, he says, and hurries to class.

Later he will tell my husband that he was secretly sobbing in bed before he called out to us that morning, that he knew it was silly but couldnt stop.

A memory. My brother and I sourcing scrap wood from the yard of a home that has recently burned down. We want to build a tree house. I spot a square just the right size for a floor, but it turns out that in the blaze, the lawn has transmuted into thick, sticky mud, and it suctions my shoes, envelops my calves. A few yards away, my brother is swallowed up to his knees. He screams. Im older, the designated protector. Panic saturates my chest. And then, as if only to test my tolerance, a blue van pulls up.

Kidnappers drive blue vans. We have been warned to steer clear.

A pale man with a splotchy beard pokes his head out the window. Can I help?

We are perfect prey, stuck in a muddy trap on a quiet culde-sac around the corner from home, out of our parents view.

I holler and squirm and somehow tug off my shoes and force my way to the dry edge of the property. I am crying. My brother is bawling.

Young lady, the man repeats. Need help?

I need my father, but retrieving him will mean leaving my brother alone with a strange man. My brother is heaving so hard that I cant understand him. (Is he saying go or no?) Have I just imagined that the mud is higher on his waist? His body lower in the earth? The drivers pointed teeth?