Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  He thinks, if the house had to shop for parts for Henry and Rachel Tuhoe at the Human Depot, it would get it all wrong too. Wrong age. Wrong attitude. Wrong ambitions. And absolutely the wrong model. As he looks up at the towering clapboard wall of the back of the house, the screened-in porch, the rear windows of the three-car garage, the matching pool house, it’s all he can think. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong life.

  Yet less than two years earlier it had seemed, or at least Rachel had convinced him to believe it was, kind of right. They had lived together on the Upper West Side for three years, two as a married couple, and had enjoyed it immensely. The laughable commute, the late-as-you-want dinners at the most eclectic places. They enjoyed watching friends’ bad indie bands in Brooklyn and not understanding the art they kept going back to see in Chelsea. Waiting on line for midnight cupcakes at Billy’s. Sunday brunch with childless friends at Cafe Luxembourg. They enjoyed having the gym and the dive bar and the bookstore next door, the megatheaters two blocks south, and the art-house theater a few blocks beyond that.

  And then they (Rachel first, he’s certain) decided that they had outgrown it. Their friends’ escapades with love and drugs, real careers and fantasy vocations no longer seemed original or terribly important. Tedious patterns began to emerge. Ill-considered behaviors were repeated. What had seemed outrageous began to register as immature. What had once passed as interesting had become banal. Melodramatic. It had rained three weekends in a row at the end of that summer, canceling the last August visits of the season to their Amagansett beach rental, which, after three years with the same people, had also become tedious, tiresome, banal. Melodramatic.

  They’d both been working social-life-killing hours at jobs at which their entry-level, young-professional-on-the-rise energy and optimism had already been replaced by increased responsibility and, yes, money, as well as questions of a deeper philosophical nature. Also, Rachel was in the middle of a feud with her best friend, which added to her already bored state of mind.

  So the early October invitation to a fall harvest festival at the northern Westchester County home of one of Rachel’s married coworkers seemed like something worth trying. Something new. On the Hudson Line train heading north, coming out of the first tunnel and seeing the sun-blasted leaves against a cloudless sky, they both felt it—that they were no longer mired in the expected but on the verge of something new and fresh and altogether different. Even the sky seemed of another place, much cleaner than the sky they’d just left.

  And even though her friend’s fall harvest festival was tedious and corny, apple this and pumpkin that—”They’re acting like they grew and harvested everything down to the last gourd and are sharing them with the original Mayflower pilgrims,” Rachel had whispered to him—they had to admit they did enjoy themselves, and the children running through the leaf piles were kind of fun.

  On the train ride back to Manhattan that evening in a slight drizzle, during which some leaves had already begun to fall, they sipped takeout cups of green tea with lemon and leaned against each other, talking about the river and hiking trails and adjustable-rate mortgages. By the time they slipped back underground and their day in the country had come to a close, they had already made up their minds. It was time to leave the city, cash in their options, and buy a big-ass house in the country like her kind-of-friend’s, and maybe, at some point, start a family.

  ~ * ~

  For a second Henry looks directly into the sun hanging over the magnolia on the southwest side of the pool and is so blinded by its afternoon rays that he becomes disoriented. He loses his balance and slowly tips over sideways. Scrambling back to his knees, he glances toward the kitchen window to see if Rachel was looking. Hard to tell for sure, but he doesn’t think she’s in there. Probably in the office, still on her conference call. And even if she was looking, he wonders if it would have registered that he had fallen. Because looking at something and seeing it are completely different things, and he knows that she hasn’t seen him in a long time. He gathers himself with several deep breaths and realizes that he has not eaten since breakfast. Not during the focus group or even after the psychiatrist/workout session with Norman. So it’s no wonder he stumbled, especially in this heat.

  He knows there’s one thing you’re supposed to balance first, and once you get that right, you move on to the others. He thinks it’s the alkalinity, but he can’t be sure. The back label of the alkalinity increaser jug offers no help. Neither does the label on the pH in-creaser. He has an entire milk crate filled with chemicals: increasers, decreasers, clarifiers, shocks, algicides, balancers. He has liquid chlorine, powdered chlorine, one-inch tabs and three-inch hockey pucks of chlorine. In addition to the test strips, he has more elaborate testing kits, small chemistry sets with tubes and droppers and their own color charts.

  Everything he needs to get it right is here. All he needs is to figure out the prescribed sequence, the proper balance, and they’ll be swimming in no time. Because it needs both, he decides to dump in half a gallon of alkalinity increaser and then four or five—how many gallons of water does the pool hold again? Twenty thousand? Thirty? What the hell, make it an even six scoops of soda ash. Standing back up, brushing off his pants, he figures he’ll give it a few hours and see how this all takes before reappraising.

  ~ * ~

  Inside, he finds Rachel standing in her office with her back to him, dressed for a casual night out. Fitted jeans and riding boots, a green embroidered silk shirt. She is tall and athletic and in many ways, he thinks, still beautiful. But in other ways she isn’t. Her long, dark brown, shampoo-commercial-worthy hair is now dry and frayed (stress? age? meds?), and for the past three months an unnatural Marilyn Monroe blond. Her once perfect Mediterranean skin has deep creases around her eyes and mouth, a condition he attributes to her increased propensity for frowning, twitching, and furrowing her brow. And her eyes, her wide dark gorgeous clean-edged eyes, which had an energy that coursed through him when she was happy or angry or horny, now seem a half-shade lighter, ten watts duller, and, up close, softer, milkier, murkier. Of all the things they have been through in the past year, it’s the change in Rachel’s eyes that saddens him most.

  “Hey,” he says, but she turns and gives him a shush wave. She’s wearing a wireless Skype headset and is holding some kind of spreadsheet. In a way, he’s relieved that she’s busy. Soon she’ll be leaving for a dinner date with one of her new girlfriends from her most recently organized social group, and he’ll be off to the latest iteration of what has become a tedious monthly male ritual: Meat Night, with five neighbors, five other men he barely knows, at a house a few blocks away. Not enough time to sit her down to talk about water for the third world or outsourcing, the chemistry of their pool and their marriage.

  Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow.

  He leans over her desk to wave good-bye. He mouths the words Meat Night and she looks at him as if he is insane. As he straightens up to leave, he notices a paperback on her desk called The Postmodern Cauldron: Diary of a 21st-century Witch.

  Before he can pick it up, Rachel snaps it away and glares at him again, as if he is the crazy one.

  ~ * ~

  Conceive Now!

  It’s too late for the butcher shop, and that’s too bad, because it would have been a nice manly touch, a butcher-shop-procured prime cut of an exotic species wrapped in a sheet of coarse white paper, a hint of blood beginning to soak through. The only thing better, Henry imagines, would be to have killed and butchered the species in question himself. Maybe next time. This time, however, the A&P meat counter will have to suffice.

  He takes special care to avoid aisle four, personal hygiene, because the last thing he wants right now is to start thinking about the quantity and quality of deodorant shelf space. Instead he takes the long way along the far edge of the store, where the aisles are lined exclusively with frozen and refrigerated goods. At the butcher’s counter in the back of the store there is a small line. An overweight young
mother in camouflage stretch pants is yelling at her two-year-old son, telling him he’d better start adjusting his attitude right quick. Directly in front of him a middle-aged couple in matching Dale Earnhardt, Jr. number 8 NASCAR shirts and hats are having a heated debate over whether they should go with the sweet or the spicy Italian sausage. When Henry looks back at the mother and child, he sees that the little boy has stopped crying and is contentedly gnawing on the cap of a six-ounce Redwood Honeysuckle Spice stick, the best-selling version of the brand he worked on until eight hours ago.

  ~ * ~

  As soon as they closed on the house, having a child went from something they might want to do to something they would try to do to— for Rachel—an obsession.

  On the train back and forth to Manhattan (while they still commuted together), Rachel no longer read literary fiction; she began to read books on fertility. She no longer drank coffee or diet soda; she drank herbal teas and tinctures and potions from the health-food store that had names like Fertile Harvest, Women’s Blend, Leaves of Splendor, and, to Henry’s amazement, the disclaimer-free, citrus-flavored powdered supplement Conceive Now!

  While their lovemaking in their Manhattan apartment had sometimes involved items such as vanilla-scented candles, massage oil, or one of Rachel’s Mazzy Star albums, those accessories had been replaced for their suburban sessions by menstrual calendars, alarm clocks, and digital thermometers.

  Several times he had to leave work early, or not go in at all, because like it or not, it was time. This was around the same time that he began to notice that she was missing from the bed late at night. Sometimes he’d find her outside in her nightgown, staring at the glow patches of clustered houses in the suburban sky. Sometimes he’d find her smoking in the empty upstairs bedroom.

  After three months without success, Rachel began to question the heartiness of his sperm, the character of her eggs. They went to doctors, who essentially told them that they were fine. That they should calm down. Henry suggested that she might want to talk to another doctor, to, you know, help calm down. But Rachel responded by telling him he was crazy and didn’t speak with him for a week.

  After six months Rachel blamed their inability to conceive on her job, the stress of her commute, so she quit and found less demanding, lower-paying work as a freelance, work-at-home (mostly) Internet security consultant. In the meantime, she bought more books, took up yoga, and had Henry ingesting up to twenty different vitamin and mineral supplements a day. Beyond C, E, and A, he didn’t know what most of them were. He knew only that his urine looked radioactive and at nine every morning his bowels would erupt with Old Faithful—like regularity.

  After nine months of trying to conceive, Rachel slipped into a mild depression. Even though she was only twenty-five, she began to play the role of a hopeless, barren, childless spinster out of the pages of a Victorian novel. She watched a lot of daytime TV and read a lot of Victorian novels, several about childless spinsters. She began, without prompting, to tell her friends and family and random strangers about their tragic predicament. She envied her neighbors’ fertile wombs, coveted their chemical-free cedar swing sets, and resented their $700-stroller-pushing nannies and baby-formula-stained minivan floor mats.

  Then, after almost a year of this, when prime conception opportunities presented themselves, she began to ignore them. When Henry reminded her, mostly because he realized it was his last best chance to have any kind of sex with her, she ignored him too.

  Eventually the thermometer went back into the medicine cabinet, the tinctures were shelved, and the vitamins sat untaken long past their expiration date.

  “Can I help you?”

  Henry looks blankly at the butcher, then at the unimpressive display of meats behind the counter. No grass-fed organic New Zealand lamb racks or sides of free-range bison hanging from chains in the back room. Just your basic chucks and chops, T-bones and pork loins.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m looking for a special kind of meat to barbecue for me and five, urn, friends.” Five men so desperate to validate their manhood they dedicate an entire night to the burning and consuming of large quantities of animal flesh. “Any suggestions?”

  ~ * ~

  He told Rachel to snap out of it and stop feeling sorry for herself. He said there was nothing wrong with her eggs or his sperm and she still had another twenty childbearing years in front of her, if she’d only stop obsessing. He even showed her an article he’d downloaded on the effects of self-imposed pressure on a couple’s ability to conceive.

  Then, that September, he took her to Block Island, to a two-hundred-year-old bed-and-breakfast on a hill overlooking the Atlantic.

  And it worked.

  Getting away from the house prompted some kind of psychic release, and they made anxiety-free love twice a day for three days. On the ferry back to Point Judith, a transformed Rachel said that she was sorry, and that maybe they should wait to have children anyway. After all, they were still kids, and maybe it would be for the best if they sold the house and moved back to Manhattan. Henry felt as if the four-thousand-square-foot weight of that house had been lifted off him. He promptly contacted their Realtor in the country, a new Realtor to help them find a place back in Manhattan. He booked a return trip to Block Island.

  Two weeks later, when he got home late one night from work, Rachel told him that she was pregnant.

  “How do you know?”

  “I missed. I never miss.”

  “Holy—”

  “It’s a miracle. Why are you not ecstatic? Where is the beaming face of the proud father-to-be?”

  “I. . . It’s . . . Considering what we’ve ... it certainly is. . .”

  “What? Don’t say shock. Our first child will not be considered a shock.”

  “How about ironic?”

  “We wanted this, Henry. We desperately wanted this, and now our prayers have been answered.”

  “Yeah. Great, Rachel. My God, but. . .”

  “Well, if you’re not ecstatic, your mother certainly is. Maybe she’ll stop pitying my barren womb now.”

  “She never . . . You told my mother?”

  “And my parents. I knew you’d be home late and I didn’t want to tell you over the phone and I couldn’t sit on this all by myself.”

  “Did you see a doctor?”

  “No. Tomorrow. I used a strip. Then I got another test at the drugstore. Positive-positive. Isn’t it amazing?”

  “Yes,” he said, and as he hugged her his gaze drifted out the kitchen window and over to the murky surface of their pool.

  The next day her ob-gyn confirmed that Rachel was two, maybe three weeks pregnant. They took the house off the market and told the Manhattan broker they were no longer interested in moving. She went back to the health-food store with a vengeance, loading up on products with names like Fetal Fortifier, Mother’s Essentials, and Living Womb. At night after dinner he painted constellations on the ceiling of the baby’s room.

  Rachel still wasn’t herself, still wasn’t the carefree woman he had fallen in love with and married, but she was happy, and that was an improvement. Regarding having a baby just then, he wasn’t sure what he wanted beyond wanting Rachel to be happy. For the first time he thought of his approach to their relationship in terms of saving her. And him, and them, of course. But he was convinced it had to begin with her.

  At eleven weeks her mother and sister began plans for an extravagant surprise baby shower.

  At fourteen weeks she began to spot blood.

  At sixteen weeks she was put on bed rest and given medication, a special foam wedge to put between her legs.

  At nineteen weeks they made their first trip to the emergency room.

  The fourth time they went, at twenty-one weeks, they lost the baby.

  That night they cried together on their living room couch. Later, in bed, he promised her they would try again. They would have another child. He was still crying, but Rachel wasn’t. She rolled over without answering.
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br />   ~ * ~

  The Ministry of Meat

  “Gentlemen!” proclaims host Gerard Fundle. “Honorable members of the Ministry of Meat, behold the bounty and the spectacle, the revolting beauty that is. . . Meat Night!”

  He raises the platter of assorted meat over his head as if it is the Stanley Cup, the Holy Grail, something more than dead flesh.

  “The carne-val of carne!” shouts Victor Chan.

  Marcus LeBlanc raises a glass. “The fusillade of flesh!”

  “Meat! Meat! Meat!” The Osborne brothers are pounding on the glass-topped table, fists clenched around knives and forks.