If Not

1.

Sappho noticed the violets, first—bouquets of them, a deep, enraged purple efflorescing

from each table draped in white, gold-lined finery.

The man sat cross-legged at the table near the front of the room, concealed in part by the

six-tier cake burdened by frosted greenery. With his shoes gleaming even in the shadow of the

tablecloth and his hair pulled back from his high forehead, he seemed a man equal to the gods.

He leaned forward—Sappho watched him—turning his head to meet painted lips with his ear, to

listen to that sweet voice, that lovely laugh. A jazz quartet played softly in the corner of the hall,

carrying over the din of the splendidly dressed crowd. But for a moment she could not see, could

not hear, and cold sweat gathered on her skin.

It was, for Sappho, a new death.

2.

A phone call came in the middle of the night, but Sappho didn’t answer it. In fact, she did

not typically answer calls. She also rarely left her apartment, came to the door wearing only the

same thin cerulean dress and no shoes. She smoked but never drank and would often let her lips

chap until they bled. Her dark curls, cropped short, swept like a storm over her eyes.

This was even before the other woman started showing up—a blonde-haired woman, who

began visiting regularly a week after Sappho moved in, though never for more than a few hours

at a time. After that, it just got worse. The other residents of Sappho’s building stopped trying to

interact with her very quickly.

 The blonde woman clearly didn’t have a key. Sometimes she would sit on the concrete

steps out front, posing for some hidden artist with her back against the green railing, and wait for

the door to crack open. She never waited for very long.

The residents had different ways to describe the visitor, but they all agreed that she was

an unearthly beauty. They imagined her borne of sea foam, drawn fully formed on a shell from

the ocean by wild horses beating up the crest of the waves with their hooves. They felt, perhaps

on a reptilian level, that beauty of that magnitude could only mean devastation.

Yet she offered her radiance to the door of this strange resident who lived like a rumor.

In mid-July, when they saw her last, she wore a dress that exposed her white, freckled

arms, so fair they reflected heat, and sacrificed herself to the gloom beyond view. But it had been

a month, and there was no sign of her, now. She and Sappho had fallen into myth.

3.

"Do you love me, Sappho?" she asked. The woman lay beside her, testing her.

"I feel like there’s nothing in my head right now."

"What a thing to say. Are you just trying not to hurt me?"

"Not hurt you," Sappho echoed.

The woman thought for a moment, the silhouette of her face nearly dissolved in the

darkness. “I don’t know if I love you,” she muttered, finally. “I can’t tell where I begin and end

when I’m with you, because you remind me too much of myself. Maybe if you were a man, it’d

be easier.”

Sappho said nothing. She had a knack for knowing when things were too good to be true.

“Just kidding,” the woman said, smiling.

4.

She did not answer the phone, but she also did not eat, sleep, or bathe. She had not done

the things people typically do in several days. She slept on the floor, which was the only surface

in her home that stayed cool through August, feeling feverish. The fridge was empty by Friday,

but she'd stuck her head in it a couple times since then to bite the cold air, craving winter. Above

her, the dawn was beginning to usher in the final Sunday of the month. She watched it through

two crooked blinds. Its fresh strokes blazed across her crusting eyes, pooled across her chest and

her abdomen, trickled down her outstretched legs to her bare feet. A small cream envelope sat,

opened, beside her. The blood kept swimming in her head. There was the poor handwriting, the

smudges of a haphazard left-handed scribe, saying, "Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?" The

phrase formed an ironic, tangled knot beneath the embossed lettering printed in violet on the

heavy cardstock. Sappho could admit she’d asked herself the same question many times before,

just not like this.

5.

As a child, she and her sister would frequent the park famous for its massive sundial.

Many evenings after school, they sat beside each other, her sister tossing bits of her lunch to the

waterfowl while Sappho lay across the marble, as cold or hot as the sun that day, and watched

the people as they passed. Women, mostly, and their children. Sappho wondered why they were

so distracted, allowing the children to skip off the path. Who would save them if, like little

stones, they tumbled, falling into the lake? The shadow of the sundial would make its rounds,

crossing over her, skipping over her, cutting her in half.

 She had never known her own mother. Her father took shifts late at night and slept

through the day, the mound of his body rising and falling, a monstrous shadow.

She stood and watched for years, sometimes with her sister, sometimes without. Winter

and summer changed positions over and over.

6.

When the phone rang again in the morning, Sappho picked it up. “Hello Sappho,” said

the voice of her sister. Her words sounded far away, as if from the end of a tunnel. “Have you

been eating?”

Sappho shook her head into the phone.

Her sister, who actually went to college, did not know the real reason Sappho had been

living less like a person than she usually did. Her sister believed she had fallen into a major

musical slump, of all things.

Unlike music, Sappho observed, wordlessly hanging up, nothing about what she had with

that woman had a logic. It was simply as unreasonable and irremovable as the mold in the

wallpaper. She kept telling herself that it could not be, because she wished for it.

She was making her way back to her usual spot on the tiles when the doorbell buzzed, a

croak followed by very long pause. She should never have underestimated family.

For the women on either side of the door there was the sense that on the opposite end was

a person she liked the idea of seeing, but didn’t want to actually see. Still, it swung open. They

stood at the threshold looking solemnly at each other—or really at each other’s ears. The woman

on the outside had a narrow face and dark, heavy brows, and curly hair that fell to her back. A

pink sunburn spread its wings across her nose and cheeks.
 She saw the invitation in Sappho’s hand. Sappho let her dislodge it from her fingers. Her

sister scanned it with her eyes. “Let’s go to this,” she said. “For the wine, obviously.”

7.
They met for the first time three years ago, when Sappho toured with her four-person

band—all male, apart from her, bearded, and mostly homeless. They played neurotic indie-post-

rock at dive bars, occasionally at adventurous bat mitzvahs. The drummer had been thinking of

quitting to pursue something more “mainstream.”

This is how she liked to imagine the whole thing played out: at one performance, she saw

the woman standing in the crowd at one of these venues. She danced with a drink in her hand,

her long blond hair swaying like a curtain about her face, the green and yellow stage lights

ablaze on the perspiration on her skin. There was a guitar in Sappho’s hand, which she was

playing. She was singing—really, yelling—something into the microphone.

In reality, it’s more likely that they’d met in January on a day with light snowfall, perhaps

at the park, on a day when one could hear faint music from the brick gazebo where a local band

was playing. Sappho could never bring herself to perform where she could run into someone she

knew. She stood instead on the sundial and watched the women pass. There was one in particular

who, upon encountering a sheet of ice on the neighboring path too wide for her to scale, stepped

onto the cold marble platform to avoid it. They bumped shoulders as she tripped on “XI”—close

enough so that the condensation from their breath joined in a cloud over their heads. Her name

was Helen.

8.
 Her sister sat in the kitchen with her head propped up on her elbow, watching the clock.

Sappho showered. She ate. She dressed herself, slowly. She smeared pink on her pallid, scaly

lips, brushed her hair and teeth, put on shoes. Her ankles trembled, so high off the ground.

The sun was blinding. She saw gold everywhere, relentlessly.

“This will be good for you,” her sister said.

Sappho wore the same kind of dress nearly every day—thin-strapped, formless satin, a

rich cerulean, the color of a noon sky when great snowfall has already passed. She wore a

version of it again, today. Who cared whether it was appropriate for a wedding.

The venue was fourteen stops away. Each time the subway car lurched to a stop, she

thought about the lights she left on at home.

9.

Gathering herself, Sappho turned away from the spectacle. Her sister had stolen a glass

and a bottle of wine from one of the tables and was downing it like water. What had Helen said

to her before, looking her in the eye? Not as a lover, but as someone on the verge of departure. It

was at the very end of winter. She had pulled her scarf tighter, trapping her lovely hair against

her neck, and breathed in even counts. She said, she didn’t know what she wanted. She only

knew she couldn’t accept herself when she was with her. Couldn’t face her reflection in the

mirror. There was this man, see, who she was cursed to learn to love—he and his perfect, godlike

features, his immeasurable wealth, his vanity complementing hers. It really might have been just

vanity.

10.
I did not expect

to find a porchlight here

the violets scattered

among bits of gold

The few of us left

magnetized

where song and dance have ended

the cabs line up on the street

so familiar

Dim flickering in pools

reflection on the sidewalk

before there was any shadow

the swing of thick heat

I saw her looking straight up

 an airplane roared

at the palest star

I did not expect

this sadness like severed wheat

from tower to seedling

just ordinary

violence

that tastes like love

and like love bends into longing

Little unrefined world

you can spin to life

a perfect sphere

and tuck away

when the night is done

 Works Cited

Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Trans. Anne Carson. New York: Vintage Books,

2002.