Beach Trip

by Cathy Holton

  He was a good cook, and after dinner she would sit on his lap and muss his hair and when he tired of her teasing, he would tickle her or carry her up to bed.

  Sometimes they might walk to the square, if the weather was fine, or even if it wasn’t. They still enjoyed their walks in the rain. The storefronts and warehouses would be brightly lit, and they would sit in the middle of the square, beside the gazebo and the memorial plaque to Roswell King, and try to imagine what the place must have looked like when King first crossed the shallow ford at Vickery and gazed upon the thickly tangled wilderness. Often they would stop for a drink at the Public House, a restaurant and tavern on the square housed in one of the old cotton warehouses.

  Gradually, their lives settled into a routine and they were happy, or at least Sara told herself they were. She worked too many long hours and Tom was worried, she knew, about defending his dissertation, but other than that, things were good. Sara spoke to Annie and Lola occasionally. She didn’t speak to Mel at all for a while, and later only on the odd occasion when either one of them, feeling nostalgic, might pick up the phone and call. She followed Mel’s burgeoning literary career with interest, and also with a secret, ironic feeling of pride. It was funny that of all the people she’d known, it was Mel who actually became a writer, the one she would have least expected to pen a novel, let alone four. She’d been in a bookstore recently and had picked up one of Mel’s novels and she’d been surprised to find that it was good. Really good. She hadn’t expected it. She was lying in bed late one night, reading Big Sleazy and laughing, and Tom said in a cool, indifferent voice, “Good book?” He was grading papers and had them strewn across the bed.

  “Yes. Very.”

  “What’s good about it?” He harbored, she knew, a secret desire to write novels that would be taught in future American lit classrooms and talked about in hushed voices by literary critics and writers’ conference panelists.

  “I don’t know. It’s—”

  “Trite? Sentimental?”

  “No. Fast and funny. It’s not great literature but she tells a good story. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down.”

  He said nothing, but went back to grading papers. A few days later she couldn’t find the book and she wondered if he’d taken it and was secretly reading it, although she could never quite bring herself to ask him.

  One warm June evening, their neighbors, the Hatchers, invited Tom and Sara to join them for dinner. The four of them had cocktails, then walked the two blocks to the square for dinner. They were already a little tipsy. Mason liked his martinis dry with plenty of gin, and Tom held tightly to Sara’s arm as they walked. It was a perfect summer evening. The moon was full, filling the street with a silvery light. Great banks of low-lying clouds blanketed the sky, and the air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle.

  Sara walked beside her husband, glad for the steadying weight of his hand on her elbow, and feeling as if the ground was rolling beneath her feet like the deck of a ship. She usually didn’t drink Mason’s martinis, but tonight she’d had three, and she was paying the price. She stumbled once and fell against Tom, and he said, “Do I need to carry you?”

  She giggled. “Would you?”

  Behind them Mason said, “Newlyweds!” and Elizabeth said, “When was the last time you offered to carry me anywhere?”

  “When was the last time you weighed one-twenty?”

  “Bastard,” Elizabeth said.

  After that, Sara decided it might be a good idea if they didn’t see too much of the Hatchers. Unhappiness was contagious, and she didn’t want anyone or anything encroaching upon their carefully constructed little world. She and Tom had their careers, their colleagues, and their moonlit strolls through the square, and they didn’t need anything else. They were young, they were happy, and they were in love, but there were times when Sara, sitting on a bench watching the moon rise over the square like a phoenix, knew it couldn’t last.

  Having decided that partnership was more important than motherhood, at least for the foreseeable future, it was with a sense of disorientation and concern that Sara found herself, twenty months later, throwing away her birth control pills. She opened a bathroom drawer one morning and saw them there in their brightly colored case, and without a moment’s deliberation, she picked them up and threw them in the trash. Later, she decided that it probably had something to do with the fact that she’d been on the pill for most of her twenties. She needed to give her body a break. She got a calendar and decided to use the rhythm method for a while.

  Not that she told Tom any of this. They had never really talked seriously about having children. They had agreed to the idea, but they had never agreed on the specifics: how many? when? But now that the time had come when the subject should at least be broached, she found herself oddly hesitant.

  Tom had successfully defended his dissertation in November and been awarded his Ph.D. Now he was planning a trip to England. He’d accepted a full-time teaching position at Emory but that wouldn’t begin until the following fall, so he had plenty of time to plan their vacation. He went around the house whistling cheerfully and spent his time poring over glossy brochures and maps of England. Sara wasn’t sure how she’d be able to pull herself away from the office for three weeks but she hadn’t been able to tell him that either.

  It was the first thing she had ever kept from him, at least since their marriage, and she wondered, in moments of quiet clarity, why she didn’t tell him she had stopped taking the pill. He probably wouldn’t have minded, or at least she didn’t think he would, but she didn’t want him questioning her decision. It was just easier this way. It was her body. And she didn’t really want a child, she told herself, not when she was so close to making partner. Manning had hinted at it just last week over lunch, and Phillips had told her point-blank in December that if her billable hours stayed high, he saw no reason the offer wouldn’t be forthcoming in the new year.

  So why was she secretly jeopardizing it all now by risking a pregnancy?

  She wondered if it was some kind of weird competition with Elizabeth Hatcher. She saw her occasionally for coffee, although Tom had steadfastly refused to have any more contact with Mason. And Elizabeth was still desperately trying to get pregnant; she had been trying for years. Don’t wait too long, she’d told Sara mournfully, or your eggs will dry up.

  Sara had read somewhere that dogs kenneled together will go into heat at the same time. It was Mother Nature’s way, she supposed, of ensuring the continuation of the species, this fierce competition over fecundity. And really, was that so surprising when competition was at the heart of everything? Competition for schools, for jobs, for partnerships. Competition for mates.

  Sara faithfully marked her calendar and tried not to think about her eggs shriveling to leathery little bags.

  In April, Sara and Tom attended the Atlanta Steeplechase. It was an annual tradition, advertised as the Best Lawn Party in Georgia, and people took it seriously. It was similar to tailgating at a prep school football game only with white tablecloths and sterling silver and people dressed up like those who attended the Kentucky Derby. Manning and Phillips always had a catered corporate tent on the backstretch, where they could easily watch infield festivities like the Ladies Hat Parade and the Jack Russell Terrier Races, as well as the thundering rush to the finish line of the five steeplechase races.

  They had been to the steeplechase once before so they knew what to expect. It was a beautiful day, sunny and breezy with a clear blue sky stretching above the rolling hills. The landscape was dotted with colorful tents and long lines of automobiles glistening in the sun. There was an open bar at the Manning and Phillips tent. By midafternoon Sara had fallen asleep in her lawn chair, and Tom was standing at the finish line with a group of rowdy stalwarts, roaring at the contestants as they cleared the last hurdle and thundered past.

  The firm had chartered a bus to take them home, and by the time they arrived back at their townhome that evenin
g, Sara was beginning to sober up but Tom was more inebriated than she’d seen him in years. She put it down to his relief and celebration over the completion of his dissertation.

  As she closed the door, he pulled her roughly against him and kissed her. His face was warm and smelled of cut grass and whiskey. He pulled her T-shirt over her head. “What are you doing?” she asked him drowsily. She hadn’t checked her calendar this morning but she was pretty sure she was still at the tail end of her fertile period. Give or take a few days.

  He unzipped her skirt and pulled it down over her hips. “What do you think I’m doing?” he asked, kissing her and backing her across the room. He had taken off his shirt, and his shoulders were sunburned and covered by a light sprinkling of freckles. She loved his arms, the sturdy thickness of them, with their faint covering of auburn hair.

  “Wait,” she said. The dying sun pushed its way through the closed blinds, falling in narrow bands across the hardwood floor.

  He picked her up and set her on the desk.

  She couldn’t let this go on. It wasn’t fair to him with his dreams of En gland. It wasn’t fair to her with her dreams of partnership. With a sudden fluid motion, he swept the top of the desk behind her. Paper clips and storage trays clattered to the floor.

  She giggled suddenly. Apparently she wasn’t as sober as she’d thought.

  He grinned and slipped her bra off.

  “Wait,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”

  He touched her hair. He licked the little hollow at the base of her throat. Distantly, she could hear the sound of the river. She thought, Maybe I read the calendar wrong. She thought, My eggs are probably too shriveled anyway.

  Five weeks later, when she told him, he took the news with characteristic calm. They were sitting in front of the opened French doors, watching the river run. Late-afternoon sun slanted across the surface of the water, turning the river a glinting sheet of blue. “When were you going to tell me you went off the pill?” he asked quietly.

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not angry, I’m just—confused.”

  Evening fell. Bats darted in the sky. Beyond the distant ridge a pale moon rose.

  “I didn’t really decide, I didn’t think about it clearly, I just stopped taking it.” She put her hand on her stomach. It felt tender. Her skin smelled different. Everything about her was different. “I kept a calendar. I thought we’d use the rhythm method, but it didn’t work.”

  “Clearly.”

  “It worked up until the steeplechase,” she said shortly.

  He stood up and went to the opened doors, standing with his shoulder against the jamb and looking out. The night sounds were as rhythmic as a heartbeat. “Well, I guess I’m to blame for that,” he said.

  “No one’s to blame,” she said, rising swiftly and going to him. She laid a timid hand upon his shoulder, feeling the muscles tense and ripple beneath her fingers. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you I had gone off the pill. Maybe I was afraid you’d say no. Maybe I was afraid that if we waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to have a baby. I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t really thinking it through.” She turned to go but he grabbed her hand and pulled her against him, folding his arms around her and resting his chin on her head.

  “I’m getting used to it is all,” he said. “It’s a shock.”

  She pushed her face against his chest. “I want this baby.”

  His arms tightened around her. “I want it, too,” he said.

  Pregnancy was easier than she had expected. There was no morning sickness, no nausea. Except for the fact that she grew huge and her skin smelled strange, she might not have known she was pregnant. She was careful, at first, about her weight, but after the sixth month, she just didn’t care anymore. Food tasted so great and she had so few pleasures now, besides eating and the occasional massage Tom gave her. He waited on her hand and foot. He brought her any food she craved, no matter what it was or when she wanted it. She was like a big swollen queen bee and he was her drone, busy and attentive to her every need.

  The baby was due in January, and in October they signed up for a Lamaze class. All the other moms wore leotards and talked a lot about natural analgesics and amniotic sacs, and Sara felt like a fraud rolling around among them in her tent smock and stretch pants. Everyone was kind and cheerful, especially the moms who’d already gone through labor before, who were more than willing to share their graphic birth experiences with novices like Sara. She smiled politely and tried to steer the conversation around to something other than delivery. She didn’t want to know the painful details. She figured the less she knew about the whole process, the better. She’d stopped reading her Ready, Set, Deliver! book after Chapter Seven (“Pelvic Pressure & Mucus Plugs!”) because she didn’t want to know what came next. It was this same logic that drove her to close her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears during the Lamaze birthing tape.

  Tom was fascinated by the whole process. He treated her like an entomologist might treat some kind of rare molting caterpillar. “Wow,” he would say, running his hand over her swollen belly, “how does it get so big? How do your hips know to stretch like that? Have your feet always had those little pads of fat?”

  One night during her eighth month, she was lying in the bathtub reading Ethan Frome. Tom was standing at the bathroom mirror flossing his teeth. She had the book resting on her immense belly when suddenly, without warning, the baby kicked and the book went flying across the room.

  “Oh, my God,” Tom said, swinging around from the mirror, his expression a mixture of repulsion and awe. “Did you see that?”

  Sara grimaced in pain as one small foot made its way slowly across the surface of her stretched skin. When the baby had finally rolled over, she sighed and pointed at the book. “Hand it to me, will you?” she asked wearily.

  “It must have flown three feet,” Tom said, shaking his head in amazement. He picked the book up and gave it back to her. “The kid’s bound to be a punt kicker.”

  “Or a literary critic.”

  He squatted down beside the tub and ran his hand lightly over her belly.

  “Don’t touch my stomach like that. You’ll just piss him off.” She was rapidly losing her sense of wonderment at the whole process. Nine months was just too damn long, which was probably why women began to look forward to labor during the end of their term. Mother Nature knew what she was doing.

  “How do you know it’s a he?”

  “Because the doctor said so.”

  “Doctors can be wrong. Sonograms can be wrong.” Tom put both elbows along the edge of the tub and rested his chin on his hands. “I’m trying to picture who he’ll look like,” he said, looking down into the bathwater like he was gazing into a crystal ball. “I’m trying to see him as a baby, as a boy, as a young man.”

  Sara put her foot up and turned on the hot water with her toes. She had begun to realize just what a crapshoot genetics were. You never knew who you were going to get. You could be the best parents in the world and still wind up with a bundle of trouble. Ted Bundy’s mother read him bedtime stories. Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother made sure he didn’t go outside without his mittens.

  What was wrong with her? She sank down deeper into the steaming water. It was probably just pre-birth jitters. It was probably something every woman went through, something she would have learned if she’d managed to get past “Pelvic Pressure & Mucus Plugs!” Their son wouldn’t be a serial killer. He would be small and sweet, and he would love his parents as unconditionally as they loved him.

  Their son, she convinced herself, would be perfect.

  And he was. Despite the fact that he had a cone head (he’d gotten stuck in the birth canal) and was covered with some kind of white chalky substance, despite the fact that he moved his frail little limbs like some kind of strange insect, he was perfect. He was theirs and he was perfect. The delivery room nurses laid him on Sara’s chest, and she and Tom cuddled him and wept like babies.r />
  She’d taken a six-week maternity leave and when the time came to go back to work, Sara was filled with anticipation and remorse. Anticipation because she enjoyed her job and missed it, and remorse because Adam was so small and helpless. The first time he slept the night, she awoke to a feeling of dread, sure he had died in the night. She rushed to the crib, only to find him sleeping peacefully. Her first day back at work she went along the halls greeting everyone, spoke to several clients on the phone, took a power lunch with the partners, then went into the bathroom and cried. Her guilt over leaving him was made easier by the fact that Tom’s teaching schedule allowed him to be home with the baby most days. It was only Tuesdays and Thursdays when they needed to hire a nanny, and they quickly found an elderly widow, a retired schoolteacher who agreed, with Mary Poppins–like charm, to stay only until Adam began walking.

  Tom absolutely adored his son. He was a wonderful father, as Sara had known he would be, and she returned home many evenings to find the two of them lying on a blanket on the floor, cooing and laughing at each other. He carried the baby in a sling against his chest while he did housework or graded papers, and he made Adam’s baby food himself, mixing it in the Cuisinart and freezing the mix in ice trays for later use. On sunny afternoons they took walks to the square or lay on a blanket beside the river, watching the water run. It was a wonderful time, a time when the world seemed hopeful and bright with promise.

  But there were other times when Sara, coming into the nursery at night and looking down at her sleeping child, would be overcome by a sudden overwhelming desire to crawl into the crib and cover him with her body. He seemed so small and helpless and the world so dangerous. She worried over everything now. Abused and abandoned children, war, and the polluted environment all touched her in a way they had not done before, as if her awareness of the suffering in the world was made visible by her love for Adam.