Sweet Affliction by Anna Leventhal Page A

names Abby remembers from visiting her mother on the Alzheimer’s ward. But she loves her girls’ clean names, names without a past.
    She has given Angela a hollowed-out egg to paint with her watercolours. Earlier she poked a hole in the top and bottom of the egg with a sewing needle and carefully blew the yolk out. The shell is so light and delicate it makes her fingers ache to touch it.
    Now Angela considers the egg, turning it over and over. She lays it gently on her placemat and crushes it with her small fist.
    â€œOh sweetie,” Abby says, “why did you do that?”
    Angela looks up at her, puzzled. “I wanted to see all of it at once,” she says.
    After lunch it’s nap time. Angela gets a blue foam mat and a blankie, and Stacey goes in the white wooden crib, which used to be Abby’s. Angela has a case of the wiggles so Abby has to lie down and hook a leg over her to get her to fall asleep.
    Who is it, she wonders. One of his co-workers? The girl from the party? Helga Volga? Of course, it’s always Helga Volga. As she watches Angela sleeping, a tiny bubble of spit escaping her lips, Abby gets an intense ache in her forearms. She has to rub them together like a cricket, and when that doesn’t work she squeezes them between her knees.
    When they were a new couple, Abby and Marcus invented a fictitious woman so they could talk about the possible directions their relationship could take. It was easier, somehow, to have a concrete focus rather than an abstract, hovering cloud of uncertainty.
    It started when Marcus was planning to travel Europe for a few months. Abby was caring for her mother and couldn’t leave, and in any case felt too old to hoist a backpack and share sleeping quarters with a dozen snoring Australians.
    â€œI want you to have your freedom,” she told Marcus. “Part of travelling is, you know, experimentation.”
    This word made Marcus feel like he was going to work on the Manhattan Project. “I don’t want to experiment, I love you,” he said.
    â€œOne has nothing to do with the other,” she said. “You’ll meet a beautiful woman named Helga Volga or something, and she’ll be like ‘Come back to my castle in the Caucasus, handsome foreigner,’ and I don’t want you to start thinking of me as like the old ball and chain.”
    Marcus started to protest but Abby kept talking. “Just make sure you’re careful, because Helga has chlamydia and I don’t want you bringing it back here and giving it to me.”
    â€œOkay, but really, it’s not going to happen.”
    â€œAnd she’s not allowed to come and live here either.”
    â€œRight. Um… can we keep in touch through letters?”
    â€œYes, but no phone calls,” Abby said, smiling.
    After that, Helga Volga became a stand-in for anyone in their relationship that wasn’t them. At parties they would select people for each other and designate them Helga Volga, the most likely candidate for an affair. When they found themselves trapped in a tired and spiralling conversation about their relationship, one or another would sigh and say “If only Helga Volga were here. She would know what to do.” After one such exchange, Abby took a piece of pink chalk and wrote WWHVD? on the wall above the doorway. Eventually all they had to do was point to the writing and their argument would seem funny and absurd in light of their love and generosity toward each other.
    â€œWill Helga Volga be there?” Abby would sometimes ask when Marcus announced that he was going to a party at a friend’s studio, or to a show in a warehouse loft, or for drinks at The Miracle. If he said no, there was a possibility that Abby would join him, though often as not she’d stay home, listening to records and reading, or sketching in her notebook, or just sitting in her armchair, smoking, with John or Alice Coltrane on the turntable.
    At