Lila stepped out of her boots and work pants and for a second exposed the naked body she was still proud of. She slipped the black dress over her head, the soft fabric sliding down her back and falling into place.
She used the passenger-side mirror to do her lipstick, careful to cover the pink, tattooed lines where the swollen flesh of her lip used to end.
To her right, wild turkeys ran through barren fields, fields that once grew cotton and tobacco, fields that someone was too poor or too old to tend. She wiped the lipstick from her teeth.
Maybe tonight would be different. Maybe Clay would take her hand and she’d let him. Maybe, after wine, they’d eat a big meal at Brodie’s, tip like movie stars.
But what kind of woman found a happy ending in Raeford? Lila drove the deserted country road toward the dying town she called home. She imagined Clay’s strong hands on her body again and wished she was more beautiful than proud.
Yesterday’s Whales
I’ve been told self-righteous people always have it coming, that when you profess to understand the universe, the universe conspires against you. It gathers and strengthens and thunders down upon you like a biblical storm. It buries your face in humble pie and licks the cream from your nose because when the universe hates you, it really hates you.
What? Malachi shouted through the door in a panicked voice. That’s impossible.
I burst out of the bathroom and wagged the positive pregnancy test wand in front of his face.
Immaculate conception is out, I said. God and I aren’t on good enough terms.
My heart was pounding and my voice was too loud. What I wanted to do was sleep and talk about this another time, a time when I had a better idea of how I felt, how I would handle the news. Though I suspected we were both looking for our moral footing, we jumped into the conversation, eyes afire.
This is a really big deal, Malachi said, sitting down on the bench we kept in the kitchen. He put his face in his hands, then peeked out like a sheepish toddler. This is just—
What? I said. You think that because you’re the East Coast’s predominant voluntary extermination proponent that we’re magically infertile? Because you tell other people they shouldn’t have children you—
There’s a clinic downtown, he said, nodding his head as if he was agreeing with himself. I know the guy that runs it. Sam Wise. He was at last week’s conference. I’ll call—
We’re not even going to talk about it? I said, moving closer to him. We’re not even going to give it the weight we give a decision about what we’re going to have for dinner? We just spent fifteen minutes in front of the produce section at the market. We just tested our peaches for bruises. We debated what type of olives—
I have strong beliefs, he said. You have strong beliefs. Your decisions are hormone-driven right now, and I understand—
You do not understand, I said, gripping the countertop and closing my eyes.
Malachi began backing away to the French doors that opened onto the slate patio, where he was grilling eggplant steaks. He was a vegetarian epicure who snuck bites of bacon out of salads and quiches when he thought I wasn’t looking. His senior year at Yale, he’d started a nonprofit he called Enough with Us, or EWU—an earnest throwback to Wordsworth’s poem “The World Is Too Much with Us.” In the eight years since, he’d put out two books and worn a path along the liberal college and Unitarian lecture circuit, advocating the end of humankind, sacrificing the human race to let nature reclaim the earth.
I was proud of him. I thought he was right. I’d grown up under two biology enthusiasts in rural Maine, where people were scarce and wilderness still had an edge. I wanted nature to win, too.
Malachi dreamt of thick forests and megafauna consuming urban landscapes, nothing but our plastics and waste scarring the earth centuries after our disappearance. He pinned lush pictures of Borneo to our bedroom walls, cliffs with rivulets of water spilling down, visions of earth with no evidence of man’s hand.
Five years ago, I met Malachi at a vegan cooking class on P Street. We made a savory vegetable pot pie and went out for wine afterward. We moved in together within a year. He knew a lot about food, poetry, music, and politics, and I introduced him to the outdoors—camping, hiking, foraging. On weekends we cooked for friends, volunteered at events for the local animal shelter, saw live music, and took long walks in Rock Creek Park.
In our house, the word breeding was said with the same vitriol used when mentioning Republicans, Tim Tebow, and pit bull fight clubs. Women churning out multiples were breeders, and when they were profiled as heroes in newspapers and television shows, Malachi wrote editorials that usually went unpublished. We are parasites on the world, all of us, he’d written. His thoughts—our thoughts?—were not palatable to most people, including my family. I’d learned voluntary extermination was not fodder for pleasant table conversation; two years ago Malachi blasted my mother over pumpkin pie for expressing her hopes for grandchildren.
You’d give them a death sentence, he said. Massive water shortages and die-offs are imminent. It’s selfish to make more of ourselves; the desire to see your genes replicated in the world is a crude biological impulse.
Before you got one one-hundredth of the world to take you seriously, she said, and that wouldn’t be enough, the earth would already be shot, done for. There may be time to turn things around.
There isn’t, Malachi said.
You are one hundred thirty pounds of FUN, Mom said, mocking Malachi’s slight frame. He scowled.
You think I like the fact—
Look, Mom said. When it comes to mass annihilation, put your money on a rogue black hole or nuclear winter. You’re pinning your hopes on the very people you’d like to extinguish.
My mother, the longtime director of one of Maine’s conservation organizations, was no softhearted bridge player who pined for craft time and sing-alongs. She wore no makeup and kept her gray hair cropped short in a pixie cut. At fifty she’d hiked the Long Trail on her own, kayaked whale-watching expedition routes off the coast of Lunenburg in Nova Scotia. Compared to Malachi, she was no less ardent an environmentalist, just hopeful.
Malachi paced in front of the patio doors, one hand in his hair, then on his lips. Hand me a plate, he said.
Where are you going? I said, something feminine and hysterical brewing inside me.
I’m not walking away from you, he said. I’m walking toward the eggplant. I need to be outside to think.
When he opened the door, the city screamed and the postwork din of Washington’s Dupont Circle spilled into our town house. Busy people walking, talking, eating, spending. The door shut behind him, and it was as if I were standing in a soundproof room. Or drowning.
Maybe I’d missed a birth control pill. Maybe my body had imposed its will and bypassed my medication and social convictions. Maybe the universe was making an example out of me: You are an animal. You are a mammal. This is what your body wants.
I guess all the cerebral striving in the world couldn’t combat the biological basics.
I’d begun suspecting pregnancy earlier in the week. My breasts were sore and Tuesday morning I’d nearly blacked out in the shower; the scent of my mango shampoo turned my stomach. I had no interest in morning eggs. I worked as a veterinary technician at the zoo and was asked to assist with the necropsy of an oryx; I begged off as soon as the veterinarian began to split the animal’s flesh with his scalpel. I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to read a book on the couch the last few evenings, a time when Malachi and I often went out to coffee shops and bars to recruit new EWU members.
What if? What if? All the sermonizing I’d done to friends, on the phone to my sister. If we all begin to make these sacrifices . . . it’s about better decisions. . . .
As I unwrapped the pregnancy test, I’d thought: Just because you signed the No Breeding Pledge doesn’t mean you can’t create a life within your own body.
And so I had.
Malachi came back i
nto the kitchen with the plate of eggplant steaks. They were drizzled with olive oil and topped with crumbled fresh feta cheese, roasted garlic, and rosemary, which we grew in a planter outside.
I can’t eat, I said, waving him off and moving to the couch, a secondhand green corduroy sectional. Our living room and kitchen were essentially the same room, set apart by a large, potted jade plant Malachi had maintained since college. One wall was exposed brick. Custom shelving lined the fireplace and held carefully selected books—Edward Abbey, Thoreau, Emerson, Rachel Carson, Sibley Guides. There were books on debt forgiveness, foreign travel, languages, seal hunting—all ready for the sporting scrutiny of our dearest friends, who came over on weekends wearing chic vintage and bearing artful hors d’oeuvres.
Are you going to call your mother? he said. Because I think you should wait. She’ll—
I’m going to distract myself, I said. Sit with the information a little longer.
I needed to be still, slow down, press pause, because I’d never entertained the idea of becoming a mother. Well, I hadn’t entertained the idea since college, when nearly all my friends assumed we would one day have children. But it wasn’t real then. Children were only a far-off given, a thing that happened to you, like wisdom teeth. It wasn’t until I met Malachi that I began to feel the weight of human guilt.
Malachi set the plate down and made me ginger tea with a splash of agave nectar. He delivered it to the coffee table next to me without asking, as if to underscore his utility and devotion as a partner. Then he fixed himself a plate and sat properly at the table, cutting the entire eggplant steak into cubes before taking a bite. I propped myself on a pillow and began reading a book on the intelligence of pigs. Except I wasn’t reading.
The book reminded me of the slick and waxen fetal pig I’d refused to dissect in high school biology, how I couldn’t bring myself to cut its perfect skin. There’d been what looked like a smile on its nascent face, as if it still expected to be born, and was hopeful for what life would bring—green pastures, slop, other warm bodies. The teacher subtracted points from my participation grade and granted me access to a virtual dissection, where I dragged a pixilated heart across the screen of a second-rate Toshiba.
Just before lab, a kid in my class, a farmer’s son, had said: Pigs sing to their children.
Now, as a veterinary technician, I regularly assisted with necropsies at the zoo. I’d picked apart red pandas who’d died after ingesting pesticides. I’d gone elbow-deep in an old camel, pocketed a worn tooth from a geriatric albino tiger. My constitution was stronger than when I was younger. I was solution-driven, fascinated by what ailments plagued these exotic animals, always eager to pinpoint the previously undetected tumor, the birth defect, or rotted intestine.
Pigs might be better stewards of the earth when we’re gone, Malachi said, noticing the book in my hands.
I closed my eyes and laced my hands over my chest.
Can I get you to try some of this eggplant? Malachi said. You haven’t eaten much today.
I sat up with the intention of standing but felt as if I couldn’t leave the couch.
Do we have any saltines? I said. Gatorade?
No, Malachi said. But I’m happy to run out and get some for you.
Don’t come back with any organic stuff, I said. Please. I need the real thing. No weird crushed-wheat crackers.
Malachi frowned, stuffed his wallet into the pocket of his slim jeans, and disappeared, letting the soundscape of the street enter again for a brief moment until he closed the door behind him.
I felt guilty. I’d let him down by getting pregnant. As if it was something my body had done. On top of the guilt, I was panicked and unleashing it on Malachi, who, despite his firm convictions, had a sweet temperament. Or a mostly sweet temperament. He could be utterly single-minded about his cause, stonewalling my friends from college who chose to have children, or speaking harshly about his cousins and their broods of kids. He had clear views on sustainable fish and could come off as heavy-handed at dinners out, advising our friends what to order—you’ve got to cut out the farmed fish. He wasn’t shy about telling you when you used too much water washing dishes, and he collected discarded wrapping paper on holidays with a pained look on his face. I wish you wouldn’t wrap my presents, he told my family last Christmas.
I dealt with his need to advise and control because it came from a good place—his love of the world—though my mother said she found his self-righteousness appalling. I admired his principled way of living. I agreed with nearly every stance he took, but for good or bad didn’t take myself as seriously. I didn’t feel the searing conviction he felt, and sometimes when we were out at coffee shops recruiting for EWU, I realized I was there more for Malachi’s company than for the cause itself.
Malachi was often serious and prone to bouts of melancholy about the environment—but he had a sense of humor. He joked with his friends over beers at the pub down the street or brought them home to drink scotch and listen to his collection of vintage Richard Pryor albums. He liked to play his mandolin on the back porch and make up songs about people passing by:
Mustache man, mustache man, he walks to the metro as fast as he can. Come hell or high water, he’ll bring donuts to his daughter, Oh sweet-talking mustache man.
He came back from the store with the sort of products he despised—commercial bastions. But he covered my feet with a throw made by Peruvian widows, poured me a glass of hyper-red Gatorade, and massaged my temples.
Thank you, I said, aware that we were playing a game of goodwill, trying to rack up a surplus of kind deeds before the unavoidable argument came.
Later that night, he came to me and said: I called the clinic, and whenever you’re ready, they can give you a pill . . . if we act early enough. What do you think about tomorrow?
I didn’t respond; I wasn’t sure how to. It was another example of Malachi’s earnest principles at work, but now they were directed at me and it hurt.
I shrugged, then excused myself. I’m going to get ready for bed, I said.
The look on his face—it was as if he’d done something kind.
I sat up in bed after Malachi turned off the lights, suddenly angry at his swift response, his inability to imagine a child in his life.
I can’t go tomorrow, I said. I’m not ready to do that.
You’re considering it? he said, disbelieving. You’re considering having a baby?
Our baby, I said. And yes.
I cannot do my work with a pregnant girlfriend, he said, let alone a child. This is my credibility. You know—
You eat bacon, I said. There are holes in every principle, exceptions to the rule, ways around, contingency plans.
Not with this, he said. Not for me. If you and I feel entitled to produce another carbon-producing life, we can no longer advocate for restraint with credibility. There is a moral imperative here you’re ignoring—
Morals are man-made fabrications, I said. What isn’t natural about a baby?
You didn’t feel that way yesterday, he said. Or last year. Or five years ago.
Can’t we just explain that it’s an accident? I said. The US birthrate is down—
Human extinction is my most fundamental belief, he said, sweeping his hand across the air as if to say that arguing was worthless.
Hearing him speak was like listening to our writer friends moan about their need for solitude and time because they thought maybe, just maybe, they were doing something important for the world.
And maybe they were. But I was tired of people being so goddamn serious about their ideas.
I felt that Malachi was afraid to touch me, and I was afraid to sleep, afraid to sink one day further into a pregnancy he did not support. I watched him, first with his eyes half open, then closed as he gave in to sleep. He was a heavy sleeper. His hair was thick and dark, good Jewish hair, he called it, though he wasn’t Jewish. He wasn’t sure what he was. A classic American mutt, he said.
He’d co
me from a large family down South that he hardly spoke to, rural Virginia folks whom he claimed had two babies each by the time they were sixteen. I’d never met them. Malachi was a self-starter, a plucky faux orphan.
I stroked his hair; I’m not sure why I felt I should comfort him. I was the one hurting.
I’ll go away for a while, I told him, many hours later, when I wasn’t sure if it was night or early morning. I’ll go to my grandmother’s summer house in Maine.
Malachi stirred. Did you hear me? I said.
It isn’t summer anymore, Malachi said, his brown eyes opening into slits and closing again.
They haven’t shut it down for the season yet, I said. I’ll go, and I’ll think.
He put his arm around me and fell back asleep. I could hear the clock ticking, stores beginning to open up outside, the righteous clang of a delivery truck’s back door. People up early, being people, being busy, being commercial, doing what people do.
I was angry at Malachi for his harshness, for putting his ideas above me. I was tempted to let loose—to cry and itemize what we owed each other. But it would have been like entering the front lines unarmored, naked—not knowing what you wanted in an argument with Malachi was a waste of time. He always knew what he wanted—upscale Thai, an IPA, the Sunday New York Times, a bookstore without a children’s section.
The covers were distributed as they always were, sheets pulled toward Malachi’s side, the comforter stuffed between my knees. There were unspoken routines and rituals, shoes underneath the bed and books on the nightstand that reminded us what kind of people we were, should we forget for a moment, or be tempted to change.
Sadness and euphoria collided in my chest, waves of each washing over the other, until I felt only confusion and fatigue.
Birds of a Lesser Paradise Page 7