Anne of Cleves
Illustration: Somnath Bhatt. On their first date, Sigrid asked Marta which of Henry VIII’s wives she most identified with, and Marta choked on her white wine. Sigrid laughed and repeated the question, slowly, and with a dawning chill, Marta realized that she was serious.
“I don’t know much about that,” Marta said, and Sigrid pressed her lips together in what looked like a condescending grin. Marta didn’t know much about history. She didn’t know much about dating women either. She had recently broken up with a man named Peter when he had asked her to marry him and move to Belize. All through her relationship with Peter, Marta had been bothered by that feeling that prickles the nape of your neck when you leave your house and can’t remember if you’ve left the gas on. Every time he kissed her, she could feel a part of herself looking away from him, toward something else that she could not then make out. But when, after three years together, he had asked her to marry him, the thing resolved suddenly and sharply into focus—both that she had only been with him because being with him was easier than no longer being with him and also that she had been waiting for a moment when this would no longer be the case.
Sigrid lifted her glass and examined it, but she didn’t seem like she was in a rush to change the subject. She had the sturdy, upright patience of an elementary school teacher. Her eyes were very green, Marta noticed.
“You’re not much of a Catherine Howard,” Sigrid said, and the name darted through Marta’s mind like a swift, silver fish. There was something there, a glimmer of recognition, or no, maybe just a desire to have the conversation over with. She had not thought much about history in some time, in years really. She had studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate, and worked at a waste processing plant in Baraboo. She might have told Sigrid this except the look on Sigrid’s face, its precise concentration, wedged inside of her like a splinter. “Definitely not an Anne Boleyn.”
“I don’t know who they are, but I’ll take your word for it,” Marta said. The wine was too sweet for her. She didn’t much like wine. She preferred Coors or Old Milwaukee, beer of the pale, weak variety. It might have been the result of spending all her time around engineers in college. They had drunk shitty beer and leaned over their notebooks and parsed their calculations long into the night. She had often woken up on their couches smelling sour and raw with rulers stuck to her thighs. That’s how it had been in college. That’s how she had met Peter and fallen in with him. They saw each other so much that it had seemed natural that they should date, and when he asked her to the movies, she’d said okay, all right, sounds good. On that first date with Sigrid, she was sad about Peter still, and uneasy, and if this was how dating women was going to be, a series of increasingly esoteric questions, she wasn’t sure she liked that much either.
“This won’t work,” Sigrid said, and Marta felt a little pulse of fear.
“What won’t work?”
“This,” she said, gesturing wildly. “You retreating, falling into silence. It won’t work.”
“I’m sorry,” Marta said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say or do. I don’t know anything about Henry VIII, or whoever.”
“That’s fine,” Sigrid said. “It’s all right.”
“You say that, except, I told you before, when you asked me, I didn’t know much about it. And you kept going, so, I don’t know. Is it okay? Is it all right?”
“It’s fine,” Sigrid said, and she leaned over the table and crossed her arms.
“I don’t know anything about any of this,” Marta said, making a circle with her hand to indicate Sigrid, Sigrid’s half-eaten $20 orecchiette, her own empty bowl which had contained a $15 Bolognese, and their table and their breadsticks. All of it. “I don’t know how to do it. These aren’t even my pants.” She had borrowed the wool slacks from her roommate Katie, and Sigrid had complimented her on them when the two of them first met outside of the restaurant. She had felt guilt then but also had felt good. It had been a long time since someone had complimented her. Even Peter, by the end of it, had stopped telling her that she was pretty. He used to say that right before he slid inside of her. He’d kiss her cheeks and say, “You’re so pretty,” and there he’d be, the blunt end of him, jabbing at the inside of her thigh, and she’d nudge herself apart to accommodate
