I feel my eyes start watering and then I am crying.
“It’s good to cry, honey,” Teeny says, her voice a bit softer. “Pretty sure Alicia hasn’t cried enough.”
We stand there together in the hot sun, a few cars passing us. After a minute Teeny hands me a frayed tissue from her purse. I take it but don’t use it.
“Well,” I say, “it was nice meeting you.”
Teeny laughs, and I laugh a little too. Then she hugs me, her grip strong around my shoulders. She smells like sugar and baby powder. “You’ll survive, dear. Somehow or other.”
I want to get in the car with Teeny and drive with her wherever she’s going. “Thanks,” I say.
She opens the passenger side and for a moment I think she is opening it for me. But she tosses in her purse, the Hummels clinking heads, and slams the door. With a sort of wave-salute, she scurries around the car, climbs in, and speeds off, like she can’t get away fast enough.
I stare after the car. Her license plate says MYTURN.
Dear Mom,
I didn’t go straight home after Alicia’s shower. I felt like I needed another layer, a buffer before home, something, as they say in soap operas, to take the edge off. I understand why people go to bars on their way home from work. There has to be a bridge, some kind of neutralizing force between two fraught worlds—in this case, the world of Alicia’s baby and the world of my own baby, except of course that I carry the latter world with me wherever I go. I’d have gone to a bar if I could have ordered whiskey and drank it without getting in trouble or dying from shame (or, you know, I guess, hurting the baby).
I wound up at Pearlmann’s, where the parking lot was crowded with the kind of people who go shopping on Saturdays, extra crowded, I guess, because of the giant signs in the windows announcing the Biggest Red Dot Sale Yet. I know I was disobeying Dr. Lang’s orders, but it felt really good to move around.
I started thinking about a gift for Alicia, and I found myself staring at a display of nightgowns, some silk, some flannel, some with buttons and sleeves and others with tiny, sexy straps. I could see Alicia in any of them, which confuses me with regard to the “kind of person” she is and how much I actually know about her, know her. I choose something in the middle: cotton, cream with pink and green flowers, knee-length with fluttery sleeves. I asked for it to be gift-wrapped and I was handed the box, neatly covered in bridal-seeming paper and tied with a gold ribbon, with amazing speed. How do they do that? It would have taken me twenty minutes at least.
I was going to leave after that, drive back to Alicia’s and just drop it at the door, or I guess maybe hand it to her personally, though dropping it at the door was my preference, is always my preference (actually seems like more of a “life philosophy” than a preference), but I wound up riding the escalator to the Infant and Child department, and that’s when everything got hazy.
Mom, have you ever even seen the aisles marked “New Mother, New Baby”? It was like…I can’t even describe it. It was like Alicia’s shower in some hysterical dimension. An entire wall of nipples. I saw the breast pump Alicia got along with maybe ten other kinds. Trashcans especially for diapers. A thousand variations on the themes of googly-eyed jungle animals/half-witted teddy bears/psychotic ducklings printed on all manners of blankets, outfits, bibs, sheets. I kept walking and ran into a display nursery, a complete room with floor models of a crib, mobile, dresser, changing table, and a rocking chair (called a “glider”). A woman, probably in her 30s and at least as pregnant as me, rocked in the chair, ankles crossed, hands on her belly, a look of misty bliss on her face. I felt like I’d walked in on something, an intimate moment, and her reaction told me I had—she sort of sat upright and we both started apologizing.
Women: constantly apologizing but rarely sorry. She wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t sorry. What on earth did we have to be sorry about?
I think as a kid I often felt that I was interrupting your solitude. I knew you loved me, but I knew you’d rather be alone. So you want to know what else happened at Pearlmann’s? I’ll kill (ha) two birds (haha) with one stone and tell you both at the same time:
Dear Baby,
I figured it was time I got you some stuff, so I found a salesperson at Pearlmann’s and I walked around the store with her and I pointed out all the big things, and I put all the little things into a basket, which the salesperson insisted on holding (“you’ve got enough to worry about,” she said, and I still can’t tell if she said it kindly or unkindly), and then I handed over the credit card Dad (not your dad, my dad—your grandfather, holy crap) gave me for emergencies and I tried not to faint when she told me the total.
I gave her my address and she said the big things would be shipped in a few days. The big things are a car seat and a crib and one of those gliders. The things I carried out with me are some of those snap-on undershirt things and some baby blankets and sheets and socks and bibs and a rattle, and in another bag there was a breast pump, and in the final bag was the gift-wrapped nightgown.
I forgot to get diapers.
But there is still time, I hope.
Love from your (trying) mother.
And love from your (trying) daughter,
Agnes
Four interesting things happen, all in succession. Dad has been keeping the portable phone in my room, despite the fact that it rarely rings. I’m in bed again, bored, bored with reading, bored with TV, bored with masturbating, bored with time passing and trying to so-called pass the time, which I guess means trying to make it go faster than it does, which I now know is an impossible exercise. So when the phone rings for the first time in five days, I practically jump to answer it.
“Agnes?”
I hesitate. “Yes?”
“Hey. How are you?”
“Sorry, who’s this?”
Some forced laughter. “It’s me—Joan.”
My heart beats faster. “Oh! Joan, hi! How are you doing?”
“Well, um, I’m okay, I guess. I actually have a question…”
“Sure—shoot!” I can’t stop making myself sound the way I do.
“So, okay, well, I know things were a little…weird…at the end of last semester. I mean, I had a lot going on and stuff, but I just found out that my housing situation got all messed up—like, I was supposed to stay in the same house with the same girls, but they invited someone else without telling me, so I basically got kicked out, and so I’ve been going nuts trying to find an apartment—anyway, the bottom line is, I need a roommate. I can’t afford anything on my own, even with a second job. I mean, you’re probably all set or maybe you want to stay on campus or whatever but I’m pretty desperate. And, I mean,” she quickly adds, “it’d probably be fun.”
I kick my sheets off because I am sweating. “Wow, well, um actually—”
“Oh…also…you should know, because I did the math, it’s actually cheaper living off campus and not having a meal plan. Seriously. Like significantly cheaper. And like our food bills would be way cheap too.”
“The thing is,” I start, not sure how I’m going to finish, “I’m not going back this fall. To school.”
Silence.
“Really? Why not?”
There is sweat behind my knees. I’m not sure I’ve ever sweated there before. “I, um, I’m just going to take a semester off. I just feel like I need to be home, you know, for now.”
“Huh. Okay. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, oh yeah, everything’s fine.”
“Agnes?”
“I mean, you know, it’s just, I think it can be hard on my dad, having me so far away, and school isn’t going anywhere…”
“My sister died.”
“Oh God…Joan,” I immediately get the hiccups. “Jesus, I am so sorry.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s one way to kill yourself.” She sounds mad, but something more brittle than mad. An anger she’s only allowed herself to feel the surface of, a cracked surface under which oozes an unspeakable fury.
“Joan,
I don’t even know what to say.” I can’t tell if my face is sweating or if I have somehow started crying. “I mean, I should know what to say. I feel like…I’ve…you know, I guess, I’ve been there.”
“Thanks.” After a minute, her voice less flinty, “I should probably let you go. I need to figure out this whole roommate thing.”
“I’d love to be your roommate,” I say, and then I really do start crying, because I would, so badly, love to be Joan’s roommate.
“Yeah. It’s cool. I’ll figure something out.”
We get off the phone in an interrupted flurry of commanding each other, or ourselves, to hang in there, to keep in touch, to hang in there.
I get out of bed and go downstairs. I want to run away, to pull this baby out of me and just run away. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to be anywhere. I am sitting at the piano, thinking about Joan’s dead sister, dead because she starved herself, and I can’t help but feel impressed. She wanted to leave the world, but not abruptly. She wanted to fade out. She wanted to erode the boundaries between this world and the next, or this world and the void, and live in that thinnest, most transparent of places. She wanted to float too.
Things don’t, as everyone is fond of saying, “happen for a reason.” What a cruel way to console someone—removing all agency while creating an elaborate game of seek-and-find for the mourner to play for the rest of her days. Could this be the reason? Or wait, maybe this is the reason, the reason my dog died, the reason my house flooded, the reason my brother killed himself or my mother left. There are things that happen. There are reasons, often never revealed, why people do what they do. Two separate categories.
Mozart’s Sonata No. 8 is open in front of me, in a book that I played obsessively from last summer, before leaving for school. Mom always preferred Mozart; Dad, Beethoven—specifically hits like “Moonlight Sonata” and “Für Elise.” The book hasn’t been touched since then, and it pains me now to think about one year ago, how different the notes sounded, how little I knew. My fingers feel clumsy and swollen. I pick up the phone and scroll through the caller ID to the last number, Joan’s number, and press CALL, and it’s ringing before I have figured out what I am doing or why. I imagine the sound of the ring on her end, a shrill sound in a sad house, Joan and her parents thinking, even for a fraction of a moment, maybe there’s been some mistake, maybe she’s alive and well, maybe this really has been just a horrific dream. Joan picks up on the fourth ring, just as a machine has also picked up, and for a few seconds, there is confusion, followed by a beep.
“Sorry, hi, Joan. It’s Agnes.” I can’t tell whether our conversation is being recorded.
“Oh…hey. What’s up?”
This is the second interesting thing that happens today—something inside of me decides, without the rest of me fully consenting to this decision, to let Joan in, as I had let her in months ago, when the only one of us with a dead sibling was me. The simple fact is that I owe her the truth. Or in some weird extrapolation of guilt, I am deluded enough to believe that telling her the truth will console her. As though this new life that will be brought forth out of my carelessness, out of the wreckage of my bottomless loneliness, can somehow make her feel better.
“I’m pregnant. That’s the reason I’m not going back to school. I’m due in about a month.”
“Oh my God. Oh my GOD, Agnes.” Joan’s mouth seems very close to the phone. I can’t tell if she’s angry or just surprised or, I don’t know, offended. I can’t tell what she is.
“Yeah, so, I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to tell you. I honestly haven’t known how to even say it. I’ve barely been able to, like, admit it even to myself.”
“What are you, I mean, how are you going to…like, you’ll just live with your dad, then? I mean, he’ll help out?” There is a frenzy in Joan’s voice, maybe even something like joy. “And oh my God, whose is it? Tea Rose? Agnes, is it Tea Rose’s baby?”
“Yes, I think so, in terms of my dad, and yes, it’s Tea Rose’s baby. I mean, it’s my baby,” I say, surprised to feel, for the first time, a sting of possessiveness—as familiar as a paper cut and just as painful. It’s the way, I realize, I used to feel about Tea Rose himself. “But, yeah, he’s the father.”
Is there anything less mysterious than a father? I wonder. Then my doorbell rings, and I hear a click on Joan’s end—the answering machine clocking out.
“Someone’s at the door,” I say. “I have to go. I’m actually not even supposed to be out of bed but…anyway, I have to go.” I suddenly feel like telling her everything but I’m flustered by the shadow of someone outside, as though the shadow is me, eavesdropping on me.
“Agnes. Tea Rose called me. Like, a few weeks ago he called. He left a message but I never called him back. Does he know?”
The doorbell rings again. “Just a minute!” I call out. To Joan: “No. NO. He doesn’t know. Do you know why he called? I have to go. Please, please don’t tell him, okay? If you call him back? There’s no point. I’ll call you later. Is that all right? Bye, Joan.”
I hang up the phone and move toward the front door and I feel like I’m in a dream, like I won’t get to the door in time, won’t be able to open it no matter how hard I pull, like in telling Joan about the pregnancy I have unsealed some kind of reverse Pandora’s box that is sucking me down deeper into itself, where the real horrors lie. And worse, I have yanked Joan down with me. Joan, the last touchstone of the substandard Eden I just kicked myself out of, the life I accidentally traded this life for.
Who will I ensnare next? I wonder. Surprise? What if it’s Surprise on my doorstep right now? “Surprise!” she might say, in the horrible sitcom version of this moment. “I hear you have some news!”
But no. It’s not. It seems impossible, after all, that Surprise and I ever even inhabited the same space, and yet we used to sleep two feet apart and occasionally share towels. How can so much change so quickly? It might take a thousand years for one inch of soil to form but it took one ejaculation to get me here.
At the door is nobody. It’s the packages from Pearlmann’s, which is the third interesting thing that has happened today, interesting because I had pretty much forgotten that I’d ordered them and pretty much forgotten what I’d ordered. Interesting because I have no idea what to do with any of them, starting with where to put them. I lug each box into the front hall and then push them into a corner of the living room.
After doing this, I sit down on the piano bench again, tired, a faint throbbing in my abdomen scaring me back upstairs and into bed. The smell of my body on the sheets, in the sheets, in my ratty leggings and T-shirt, is weirdly intoxicating—something between gross and good. I pull up the covers and stick my nose in my shirt and huff at myself like I used to do with my baby blanket, which I called “dodo” and which Simon took upon himself to rid me of. He said, “That thing is disgusting,” yanked it from under my nose, and tossed it effortlessly up on top of the kitchen cabinets—the highest point in our house and in the world, by my seven-year-old standards. Then he laughed, shoved something in his mouth, and left, banging the back door behind him. I couldn’t get my dodo and nobody got it for me. Years later, during one of her big kitchen clean-outs, my mother found it, coated in dust. She asked me if I wanted it, and when I said yes, she said no, that it was too filthy and it was time to get rid of it. I felt too much shame to put up a fight, but I cried as bitterly that night as I had three years before.
I wake up to a darkening room, surprised at having been asleep. I hear the sound of muffled movement in the hall and then a soft knock on my door.
“Come in.”
“How do you feel?” my father asks. He is carrying a box.
“I’m okay, I think.”
“There are a lot of boxes downstairs. I don’t know if you saw.”
“I meant to tell you that I ordered some stuff. Um, baby stuff, with your credit card.” I sit up in bed.
“Yes,” he says. “I got the statem
ent in the mail already.”
“Is it okay? I can return it to the store I think. I just…I don’t…we don’t have, like, anything.”
“No, no, I’m glad you got what you need. It’s time to start preparing. I’m actually...I’m beginning to clear out Simon’s room.” The knuckles on his hands holding the box are white.
“Do you need help?”
“No, no. I think you should rest. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”
“What are you going to do with it all?”
He indicates the box he is holding. “I’m boxing it up, putting it in the attic. The dresser and bed and night table—I think those things can stay. I’ll put different blankets on the bed. A crib can still fit. Babies get up a lot. You might like having a bed to rest in. What do you think?”
I don’t feel like pretending it’s not weird to put my baby in my suicided brother’s room, to lie in the bed where he died.
“I think that’s a good idea, Dad.” The relief on his face is as real as we are. It is the realest thing in the room. I did not know he needed this so badly. Maybe he didn’t know, either.
He disappears with the box, his footsteps light.
“Dad?” I call out. “Do you think there will be space for the glider?”
“What’s a glider?”
Dad drives me to my weekly appointments. He sits in the waiting room outside the waiting room, which is two chairs in the hallway near the elevator. We don’t speak on the way to the hospital. I pee in a cup, get weighed, have my blood pressure taken, get dopplered. Dr. Lang tells me everything is fine. He tells me I must go to the hospital immediately if I have any bleeding or sudden pain or if I feel faint. I feel suspended between panic and total oblivion—each, it seems, the utmost reach of the other. During the sonogram, I find myself unable to look at the screen. I stare down at the goo on my belly and refrain, each time, from commenting on the irony of what it reminds me of.
I will be induced in three and a half weeks, five days before my due date—October 16. A Sunday. Dr. Lang offers me this date, scanning the calendar on his computer, as though I will be meeting him for coffee and not bleeding and shitting all over him.
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