Want

by Lynn Steger Strong

  They think he’s schizophrenic, I say. His face and hands were burned.

  How awful, she says.

  * * *

  I’m breathless by the end and flushed and then I’m very sorry. I stand up to go to the bathroom and spend five minutes in a stall so I don’t cry. I want to go home and lie down quiet in bed with our girls until they’re grown.

  When I come back my food has been served and is wilting. Everyone looks anxious, waiting, their napkins spread across their laps, food untouched.

  You okay? my husband whispers.

  Yeah, I say. I touch my glass’s rim like she did.

  We have a proposition, the guy says once I’ve sat and sliced into the steak but not yet chewed it. I look down at my food. I drop my fork, reach for my drink.

  Okay, my husband says. Go on.

  * * *

  When we get home I’ve been crying and my husband’s angry and my phone’s dead in my pocket and both girls are deep asleep in bed. The babysitter is watching TV on her computer and my husband goes to pay her. I sit on the edge of one of the cribs we converted to beds and watch them sleep and cry a little more.

  I grab hold of their feet; I kiss them; I find my husband in bed. They want, it turns out, not his skills or smarts or any of the kind of long-term employment that we had hoped for. They’ve offered us twenty thousand dollars for my husband’s sperm.

  * * *

  It’s raining the next morning, and I put on a long-sleeved shirt and shorts and wrap my phone inside a plastic bag so I can bring it with me. The rain’s torrential and I don’t see a single other person; it’s still dark out. Water sloshes in my shoes and I have to wipe it from my eyes so I can see. Sometimes, as my feet fall into puddles, I wonder if I’ve misjudged their depth and my calves and thighs clench, just before my feet meet ground again and they take off.

  I take my clothes off in the hall of our apartment when I get home. I leave a wet pile outside our front door, socks and shoes and shirt and shorts, and I peel off my sports bra and my underwear inside the bathroom as it fills with steam from the shower and I get in.

  My husband grabs hold of my bare arm as I’m walking toward our room to get dressed with a towel wrapped around me.

  You went running, he says.

  I nod and shrug and smile.

  His hand is big and warm but my arm stays tight and I start to lean away from him. He’s not angry, but his grip also isn’t soft.

  This shutting down and pushing through, he says. It’s not as convincing as you think.

  * * *

  There is a woman in Josslyn’s apartment. The door is cracked open and I see her in the kitchen, opening the drawers.

  Hello? I say.

  It’s been a month. The place still sits empty. Pieces of the floor tiles are still missing and the molding at the base of the hall walls close to her door is still charred.

  Hi, says the woman in Josslyn’s apartment.

  She’s my age, a little younger. She wears a pleated skirt, a tucked-in tank top, her hair held back in a bun. Last I heard from Luis, the cops think it was a random man who’d fixated on her from across the street for months.

  I’m Iffy, she says.

  I tell her my name.

  Ifeoma, she says. My name’s Ifeoma, but my mom’s the only one who calls me that.

  I nod.

  There’s a small box a quarter full in the corner, an old TV on a wooden box in front of a dark-red couch with a wool blanket spread over the back in the room past where she stands.

  Josslyn was my mom, she says.

  I’m so sorry, I say.

  I think I want to hug her but stay still.

  She nods, her hands still by her sides. She was a little nuts, she tells me.

  She shakes her head and I step closer to her but stop at Josslyn’s doorway.

  She says, again: She was my mom.

  * * *

  I’m at work when I get an email from the rich woman. There are paragraphs below her signature about copyright and confidentiality. The disclaimer covers ten times the space of the few sentences she writes.

  I worry that we shocked you, she writes, and I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind I found your email online. I wanted to say that we don’t mean to presume anything in our asking for this thing that feels so monumental. It’s just we liked your husband so much. We’re so desperate to find something that works.

  Everybody likes my husband, is attracted to him; everybody falls in love with him.

  She tells me about their failed attempts at IVF and her husband’s low sperm count. She tells me she’s imagined inserting the sperm of someone she doesn’t know into her womb. They clean it, she writes. In a machine. It’s all so strange and clinical and I couldn’t quite imagine how a baby might come out in the end. It’s all so abstract, so unreal, so exactly nothing like I thought. I just, she says. I thought it would be worth it to ask and I am sorry if it freaked you out.

  * * *

  I sit at the high school in an office with five other people. Fake wood panels separate our desks. Everyone seems always to be busy. I used to feel busy, but now I come here and stare at my computer, not sure how I used to fill all of my time. I keep looking around to see if anyone is watching. I wonder if someone somewhere in human resources has gotten an alert because the word sperm passed through the network on its way to me.

  I close my computer and go back to reading: So Big, Edna Ferber. About mistakes it’s funny. You’ve got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep other people from making theirs they get mad.

  I pretend the woman hasn’t emailed. I want to be able to say no to her without thinking. I want to give her what she wants, to get what we want, and not care. I no longer believe that there’s such a thing as everybody getting what they want and no one paying for it later. I’m embarrassed, maybe, by how much I still hope that we can get to okay on our own.

  I’m sorry if it freaked you out, I think.

  * * *

  I call Melissa to check in about the investigation, to see if she’s in trouble. She says she hasn’t heard from anyone. Which means, she tells me, that I’m the one under investigation for whatever they think I did.

  Some fucking shit, I say.

  I know, she says. It’s all politics.

  There are factions in the department of which I have very little knowledge—groups of people allied with one another who like to hire other allies. Groups of people who have, for a long time, been trying to push her out.

  I leave work early and surprise our girls at pickup.

  Mommy, says the four-year-old, on our walk home, if you don’t go to work, will we still live?

  * * *

  The Chilean writer’s going home for a month before the start of the new semester. She calls and I’m supposed to be at work but I’m staring at a painting in a gallery in the East Village by myself; it’s a landscape, Rackstraw Downes, the city; it’s all the sketches that he drew in advance. I’m not sure, after telling her all that I told her, that I can be in the same room with her again, but I see her name and I answer, wanting then to tell her about what I’m looking at.

  I’ll come meet you, she says, before I can stop her.

  The paintings are just shy of realist: meticulously detailed and from unexpected angles.

  We’re not far from Chinatown, and we walk farther south to get a plate of dumplings.

  I’ve missed you, she says, holding my arm; I feel my body lean toward hers.

  I talk less than she talks and she doesn’t mention Sasha.

  My sister, she says. The one who’s dead.

  The dumplings are filled with pork and beef. The salt settles on my tongue and I have to open my full mouth to let the heat out.

  We took her youngest daughter in after she died.

  I wrap my hands around my green tea.

  She was fourteen and her brothers were all older. She found her, her mother; she’d strung herself up by her neck.

  My son w
as still in the house and, though maybe I didn’t know it then, my marriage was ending. And we took this feral girl into our house because I thought maybe I had killed her mother. We took her, I guess, because she had nowhere else to go.

  She was wild, she says. Dumbstruck, maybe. She hardly knew us; her dad was gone, her mother dead.

  It was awful, she says, for the months and years that followed. I was watching her destroy herself in slow motion. We tried all the systems, all the techniques, all the private schools and therapists and locking her inside her room, and nothing worked.

  But time passed, she said. She got older. Time passing is the only truth I believe in anymore.

  We’re not friends now, she says. She doesn’t call me Mom or tell me that she loves me. But she has thanked us once or twice for caring for her. She finished college, has a small apartment not far from us. Once a month or so she agrees to come over for a meal.

  I love her, she says, and I think my sister would be grateful for it. I’m grateful that I get to love her, that there is that space still, for me to make a sort of amends.

  * * *

  I get coffee with the rich woman who wants to buy my husband’s sperm. I touch my stomach while we talk, unthinking. I do this all the time and it’s only now—cognizant, suddenly, of my powers as a baby maker in the presence of this woman who seems so wholly defined by her inability to make a baby—that I realize how often I do this.

  Can’t you get sperm for cheaper? I want to say. Aren’t there better ways to spend your money? What is it like, I want to ask, to have money like you do? I can’t fathom the power, the way she must walk around every day so differently than I do. What’s it like, I want to say, to have pain in your teeth and go get them fixed instead of waiting it out until you’re pretty sure the nerve has died since you don’t feel it any longer? To not always have to be shortsighted because to look ahead is to just see more and more, but even more expensive, of the same? To not get the bad, refurbished phone that you have to replace regardless, the winter coats and hats and gloves that fall apart and break? I can fathom this, because I used to have it, because I was brought up inside it and had to unlearn it, which makes me resent it that much more. I recognize the look of it on other people, and I hate them, because I still have to remind myself, too often, that what they have is no longer mine.

  I’m not so very married to genetics, I say. But I’m not sure this is my choice.

  Your husband said you needed to be okay with it, she says. That’s what he told Jeremy.

  I have forgotten that her husband’s name is Jeremy.

  I am momentarily furious that my husband talked to him without my knowing, but I appreciate—though, of course, also resent—that he has given me the final say.

  I want everything both ways all the time and I’m tired of feeling sorry for this. I want the money that they would give us and for my husband to be okay with it, for us to just forget about it, to pretend it never happened, to pay our rent for a few months without worry. But I have no control over my thoughts or feelings, and the fact that somewhere in the world would be a small baby like our babies, who is part of him but who we cannot love and keep safe, who we cannot check on late at night when she is sleeping, makes me scared and sad.

  The rich woman says: I feel hollow all the time.

  I can’t look at her. She is a person who has lost things, who has felt things. I don’t have space left in my brain to worry about her too.

  I’m sorry, I say.

  I liked you so much, she says, the night we met.

  I think how good I am at pretending.

  Jeremy said things haven’t been easy for you guys, she says.

  My hand is, once again, on my stomach. Fuck you, I think.

  Jeremy says your husband says you’re miserable at your job.

  We could offer you— she says.

  I think she is about to offer us an amount of money that we could not say no to, and I almost reach up as if to place my hand over her mouth.

  * * *

  When I leave her I walk an hour before getting on the subway. As we wait underground, because the train’s delayed, I scroll through to Sasha’s Instagram and then I see her: squished face, thick, dark patch of hair, and mottled skin. Sasha’s baby. And Sasha smiling, her face perfect, holding her.

  6

  THERE ARE ONLY two weeks left of school and everyone has mostly stopped pretending that they have a job to do. Everyone has stopped pretending they know how.

  I went into the meeting in which I was meant to get my offer for the next school year and the principal ate grilled cheese. He showed me a contract with a two percent raise and told me he thought I was more well suited to teach ninth grade, though I’ve been teaching the juniors and seniors all year, though I was hired to help to prep the upperclassmen for college.

  I told him I wasn’t sure kids that young would be the best fit for me.

  My background is university teaching, I said.

  He nodded, already knew this, wiped tomato off his face.

  Ninth grade doesn’t take any tests, though, he said. I know, he said, test prep isn’t your thing.

  A week later, I went back into his office and I quit.

  * * *

  There are people I like who are staying, or who are finding jobs at other schools like ours. Both my co–homeroom teachers plan on leaving also, one for grad school, one for another school. I think briefly of thanking them for covering for me, all those times that I was absent, but then I’d have to tell them that I left and so stay quiet. I look down at the floor each time I tell another person that I’m leaving. I pick at the edge of whatever shirt I’m wearing and give some heartfelt, earnest talk about the system being broken. But it won’t get better when I leave it. I’m leaving because I love my students but not as much as I wish I loved them, not enough to work harder and be better; because I love my children more.

  * * *

  I’ll be paid through the summer and, with Melissa’s help, I’ve picked up three more adjunct jobs for the next semester. We cannot live outside the systems and the structures, but, it turns out, I cannot live within them either anymore.

  There are murmurings—they’ve reached a higher pitch this past month—that the corporation to which we send our rent check is going to take the opportunity of Josslyn’s death to turn the apartments in our building into co-ops. I sleep later and later and my runs get shorter. I eat the free junk food at work and feel lethargic and my clothes start to feel tight. I am no longer willing to have sex with my husband. This does not happen all at once, and I still sometimes give in. But each time he reaches for me—I can’t stop thinking about that asshole professor at my night class, every man I see each time I read the news—my skin crawls and I want to hide in the corner of the bed and go to sleep.

  It’s complicated, I say, when he looks at me.

  I just can’t right now, I say.

  It’s not complicated that you don’t want me, he says.

  It’s not about you, I say.

  Except it is, he says.

  It’s men, I say. I don’t want to give anything to any man right now.

  He’s a good husband and this isn’t fair. I understand this. And yet I still don’t want to. Sometimes I give into it because I want him to be happy, because I love him and I like him and he’s a good dad and he loves me. I curl even closer to the wall afterward.

  * * *

  Every morning, before school, I meet Kayla and I buy her breakfast at the diner across the street from school. She texted me from the train to school three months ago that she was hungry and she was early and I offered to get her food. We met here and then again the next day. I get coffee and she gets a four-dollar sausage, egg, and cheese, and we sit and talk or we are quiet and she eats. I sip my coffee with extra milk and try hard not to put my arm around her as we walk to school.

  Be careful there, says my co–homeroom teacher as she watches Kayla and me walk through security together, laughing.<
br />
  I am, I tell her, without wholly knowing what she’s saying, knowing that whatever line she’s warning I not cross is long since past.

  * * *

  I’ve texted Sasha Congrats even though she didn’t tell me. Thanks, she responds a day later, another emoji, and I want to call or go to her, but I can’t, so I just wait for her to call and every day, when she still hasn’t, I check again for pictures but there’s none. I see the same one she posted twice more, posted by her mother and her sister, and, late at night, I stare at her, click through each version, wondering what she’s like.

  * * *

  I get home from work late because it’s the end of the year and I’m starting to realize I won’t ever see my students again after the year ends. I give them my number and my nonwork email just in case. I think I’ll hear from Kayla, one or two of the others—the kids off to college, the ones I have promised to help with their freshman-year papers if they give me enough advance warning, will send me some late-night emails at the end of each semester the first year. We sit together in a classroom after their finals and I help them with their personal statements; the CEO won’t let them go home for summer until drafts of their statements are turned in. I have candy in my bag from the teacher workroom, and I hand it out to the six or so kids who sit with me. I have each of them read their statement out loud and we try to make sense of them together. One girl writes about a summer program she went to and how she ran out of money. Her father had saved so that she could have some spending money while she was there—except, she writes in the statement, she was with these other kids who spent money like there was no end to money. It was a three-week program. She had seven dollars left at the end of the first week. She writes about calling her dad and asking him to send her more and the way she was transported back to her life as she listened to him, silent on the other end for too long. How quickly she’d forgotten the image of her parents, who worked on their feet all day, her dad a mechanic, her mom braiding hair. He sent the money to her. She forced herself to envision, she writes in the statement, what they had gone without, done more of, to make that possible. Another boy writes about asking questions, his obsession with it; another boy writes about cooking dinner for his mom, and then about a trip he took with Outward Bound. I help them to fix sentences and sharpen paragraphs. We laugh and their work starts to get better and I think maybe I should stay.