Topics of Conversation

by Miranda Popkey

  The monitor on the coffee table crackled. It was mine, his already wrinkled face collapsing in on itself, his breath coming in little gasps, his arms wriggling. I stood.

  “I’ll go, too.” It was Dominique, rising from her chair. “Élise is such a light sleeper, she’ll be up in a second if she isn’t already.”

  Sandra’s spare room was dim, the shades drawn against the glow of the sun now beginning to set outside, a night-light plugged into the socket by the door. I picked my son up and he quieted. Élise was in fact awake though not complaining, blinking up at Dominique through thick, dark lashes. For a few moments we were silent, me pacing beneath the window, jiggling my arms up and down, Dominique sitting cross-legged on the ground. She’d taken a bottle from her bag and was nudging the nipple into Élise’s mouth.

  “Mine,” Dominique said, “told me I should feel lucky.” She was whispering. Above her voice, the sound of Élise suckling. “He was older than yours, not married. Divorced I think, no kids. But in other ways it was similar. First job out of college, my boss, sex in the office, that sort of thing.” Dominique was turned away from me but I saw her shoulders move up and down in a shrug. “He said I should feel lucky. He said no one else would want me. I know I look—now”—Dominique’s shoulders moved again—“but I got braces late and my skin was bad and I had glasses and freshman year I gained all this weight, plus it took me ages to figure out what to do with my hair. My senior year of high school I shaved most of it off thinking that would solve the problem, which it did. It also made me look”—I could hear the smile in her voice—“like an egg with a bit of hair on top.” Élise was done feeding and Dominique put the bottle down. “He asked me if I was a virgin. He said, I bet you’re a virgin. And I wasn’t, not technically, but I might as well have been.” Élise’s head was resting on Dominique’s shoulder now and Dominique was standing. She turned to face me. “Was yours ugly?” My son’s eyes were drooping shut.

  “Not particularly. I mean, he wasn’t handsome, either. A little pudgy, thinning hair. Standard-issue middle-aged white guy.”

  “Mine was hideous,” Dominique said. “I mean truly repulsive. Short and squat and bowlegged. Pockmarked and bald and he didn’t take care of himself, his teeth were yellow and his breath was terrible and there was always dirt under his fingernails. Also hairy, fantastically hairy. That’s what made me think of it, the fact that yours had hairy hands.” She smiled. “And he was telling me”—the smile became a grimace—“later I understood that his ugliness gave him power. Or anyway it made him mean, and if you’re a man, a white man, being mean, usually you get what you want.” She paused. “But I think also he could see the ugliness in women, I mean, how ugly they believed themselves to be. It was some kind of superpower he had. Because by then I’d lost the weight, I wasn’t breaking out, the braces were off, I’d figured out contacts—but it was like he could see me at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. He could see, in my head, he could see that was still what I thought I looked like.”

  We were both pacing now, jiggling our arms, moving in opposite directions, passing each other under the window.

  “Did you believe him?”

  “About what?

  “About being lucky.”

  “You know,” Dominique said, “I think I did. And more than that, I think I was relieved. To know that someone who found me so unattractive—he was always telling me how badly I dressed, how my breasts were too small, how I needed to lose more weight—still wanted to—” Dominique paused. Élise was asleep again and Dominique settled her into her carrier. She stood up and faced me and cupped her hands around my son’s small ears. “Still wanted,” she said, “to fuck me.” She smiled. “To be fair, my clothes were terrible. But I think I thought that made him special. And that that made me lucky. Lucky to have found this guy who was nice enough to overlook all the things that were wrong with me. Which, I mean, now I get it. This ugly guy, fifty years old. Of course he was into my twenty-three-year-old pussy. Back then though—” Dominique shook her head. “I was amazed. I swear I was amazed.”

  Dominique dropped her hands. My son had fallen asleep. Dominique stepped outside and I closed the door softly behind her, kneeled to settle my son in his car seat.

  “Home Depot.”

  “Home Depot?” Fran looked at Sandra.

  “You said”—and now Sandra was looking at me—“you wanted to know how we got here. When it happened. The moment when the wine and the kid and the no partner, when those things became inevitable. Well.” Sandra sipped her white wine. “The short answer is I went to Home Depot.” Raised eyebrows, raised glasses, eyes moving, and a look that flashed, or was it my imagination, between Dominique and me. “My husband,” Sandra continued, “my husband at the time”—another sip of wine—“wanted to build me a desk. It was a present. A thoughtful present.” Fran put her phone back in her purse, the gesture indicative of respect if not interest. “I’d been talking for years,” Sandra said, “about going back to school. Not full-time. Just taking a few night classes. I wanted to learn how to draft.” Rueful smile. The wine glass was on the table now and she twisted its stem. “I knew it was too late to become an architect. You need a graduate degree, and even after the degree, you have to apprentice. It’s not called an apprenticeship, not anymore, but that’s the word for it. Long hours, total deference. The word junior in front of your title. And I was already forty, forty-one, I wasn’t going to spend three years working fifty-hour weeks for a man a decade younger. Not if my business cards also read junior.” Another sip of wine. “Not that I would necessarily have had business cards. Anyway”—clearing-away hand motion—“I’m stalling. Sorry.” She smiled. “Sorry, I’m nervous. I’m not used to talking about—” She shook her head, cleared her throat. “Anyway. I wanted to learn how to draft. But to draft you need tools, protractor, ruler, sharp pencils, you need, obviously, you need skills, and on top of all that you need also a large horizontal surface. I could buy the tools. I could learn the skills. And my husband said he would take care of the surface. He said he would build me a desk.” She was twisting the stem of the glass again, stalling again. “He was a kind man. Is a kind man. Kind and thoughtful and he wanted to make me happy. That’s why he sent me to Home Depot. He wanted me to pick out the wood and the stain. He offered to go with me, but I said I would go alone. It felt more”—she shrugged—“like a surprise that way. I imagined folding up the piece of paper on which I’d written my desires and giving this piece of paper to my husband. I imagined forgetting what it was I’d written down. I imagined, some months later, getting exactly what I wanted, how it might, if I were lucky, feel like accident, like serendipity, rather than design. Rather than my design, I mean. How it might feel like his design.” More shrugging. “He was good at giving gifts. Is good. I mean, I imagine. We’ve stopped exchanging gifts for”—hand motion—“obvious reasons.” Sandra’s lips looked like they had wrapped themselves around an especially sour slice of lemon. I think she was trying to smile. “Can I,” she said, “get anyone more wine?” “Please,” I said. I did not need more wine but I sensed Sandra’s anxiety, remembered her trip to the kitchen during my story, forgave her the insult, hastily drained my glass, warmth flooding my body, the warmth partly self-satisfaction. “I’d love some more white.” Sandra rose and went to fetch another bottle and I looked at Dominique and yes, there was, in her eyes, a kind of interest, a spark of complicity. Awareness of what I had done for Sandra and gratitude and sympathy. I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometimes this current is so hot it all but boils and other times it’s barely lukewarm, hardly noticeable, but always the current is present, if only you plunge your hands just an inch or two farther down in the water. This is regardless of the gender of the people involved, of their sexual orientations. This is the natural outcome of disclosure, for to disclose is to reveal, to bring out into the open w
hat was previously hidden. And that unwrapping, that denuding, is always, inevitably sensual. Nothing binds two people like sharing a secret. One of the secrets I imagined Dominique and I sharing: our dislike of Fran. Call it hatred. Outsized emotions are easiest to summon when the stakes are low. When Sandra returned, Dominique and I both accepted more wine. Fran shook her head. I thought the word uncharitable. Though it also made sense: she’d barely touched her wine, which, fair, she was small enough a thimble would do for a shot glass.

  “By the time,” Sandra said, her voice lower now, she was speaking more slowly, “I went to that Home Depot, we’d been married almost twenty years. And we’d been trying for a child for almost ten. By trying I mean, just, you know”—a hurry-up motion with her right hand—“nothing fancy, just not being careful. We wanted a kid but we didn’t”—she shrugged—“we didn’t want to push it. I’d had, in that decade—” She inhaled, said this next part quickly, “Two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy,” exhaled. “So by the time, well—we figured it wasn’t going to happen and we’d made our peace. Russ, that was my husband, Russ had younger sisters and they had kids and I was a beloved aunt, am still a beloved aunt. Well.” She smiled. “Perhaps slightly less beloved. Anyway. I was going to learn how to draft and Russ was getting into woodworking, obviously, he was building me the desk, I mean, we’d figured it out. We weren’t unhappy.” Sandra sighed. “But then I went to this Home Depot. I picked out the wood and I picked out the stain and I wrote the names down on a piece of paper and I picked up a level, which Russ had asked me to buy since I was going to Home Depot anyway, and I got in line. And in line, in front of me, there’s this couple. A boy and a girl. I close my eyes and I can still see the backs of their heads at the moment I become aware of them. Two normal heads with normal hair, totally unremarkable. Kids, both of them. Well, kids to me, in fact they were probably in their early twenties. She has her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder and she’s leaning into him like she’s trying to get every part of her body as close to every part of his body as she can. This kind of physical intimacy, that’s how I can tell they’re young. I mean, there’s the clothes and the pimples on his chin that he keeps poking at with his finger, and how smooth her skin is, but the thing I notice first is how she’s leaning into him, and only kids do that in public, little kids with their parents, wrapping their bodies around mommy’s leg, and big kids with their boyfriends and their girlfriends. Like if they’re together, doesn’t matter where, they’re not going to waste that time, that precious time, being even inches apart. It’s a little—I mean it’s a lot, sometimes, to look at, that kind of need, in public. It can be—well, it can be disgusting. Especially if they’re also kissing and usually they are. But there’s something, or, looking at these kids I felt also there was something, sacred isn’t the word, but they were treating this mundane moment, Sunday afternoon in a crowded Home Depot, waiting in line to check out, they were respecting this moment, they were insisting it was too good and special a moment not to honor with this display. There was a kind of, I don’t know, reverence to it. Gross as it also was. A kind of honesty.”

  Sandra sighed. “I’m stalling again. But okay what happens next is basically nothing. What happens next is the girl, she has this really long, sort of light brown hair, not mousy, what I guess you’d call honey-colored, and not straight, it’s got a little wave, a little muss to it—I mean, it was a little greasy, too, if I’m being completely honest—and he turns his body toward hers and he lifts her hair, he takes this big handful of hair and he lifts it off her neck, and she’s got this—she’s got this extraordinary, this neck, this long, thin, pale neck. And I mean nothing about this couple is elegant, she’s wearing sweatpants and he’s wearing basketball shorts, and so this neck—it’s sort of shocking, this neck belongs on a ballerina, not on some—Anyway, out comes this beautiful neck and he leans down and kisses her, tenderly, this soft little peck, right behind her ear, where the neck starts to turn into head. And, like, okay, this is definitely gross. Like, my usual attitude toward this kind of display is Get a room, is, Some of us are just trying to buy levels here. But what I feel, looking at them, it’s not frustration or annoyance or disgust. What I feel is something”—she clenched one hand—“in my chest tightening, something in my stomach falling, and—and this is the part that, in that moment, I am completely confounded by, because what I also feel is—” A pause. “What I’m confused by is that these feelings, they’re coming from—” Another pause. “I’m older and maybe there’s not a ton of romance in my life and you’d expect, I mean I would expect to feel a kind of envy of the girl, of her youth and the intensity of her desire and the intensity of this guy’s desire for her. But what I feel”—intake of breath—“what I want, actually, is to be the one kissing her neck. It’s like when, when you go to the eye doctor and they’re checking your prescription, when they’re getting close to the right one and they slide the, whatever it is, the glass with the right magnification in front of your eye and suddenly the blurry chart on the wall that you’ve been looking at sort of jumps into focus. All my life, witnessing these scenes, I’d been imagining myself as the girl and feeling, you know”—Sandra shrugged—“feeling like This is the thing I’m supposed to want, feeling like Okay, sure, seems like I want it, and all of a sudden there’s like this”—she snapped her fingers—“the right glass slides down and there’s this jump and I realize, Oh no, it’s the guy, I want to be the guy.” Sandra sighed, shook her head, took another sip of wine. “I think I stole the level,” Sandra said. “I know I stepped out of the line, I remember bumping, sort of crashing, into whoever it was behind me, I was in such a hurry. I know I left the store. And now Russ owns a level, so. But so I get home and there’s my husband and he’s sitting in the living room of the house we own and he’s eating off of one of the plates his mother gave us as a wedding present and it seems so clear, it seems so clear that this is my life. And the moment at the Home Depot, it gets”—Sandra waved a hand—“put away. I mean, later of course I think back over my”—she grimaced—“sexual history, how uninterested I was in dating all throughout high school and college, how I married the first man I slept with, how the best thing I can say about my sex with him is that it is never unpleasant, and certain things become—But women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex, right? I mean, this is what I was raised, what I’ve been telling—Anyway.” Sandra laughed, a sharp bark of a laugh. “Three days later I miss my period. Which is actually comforting because it helps explain what happened at the Home Depot, right? My hormones were all over the place, signals got crossed, thank god I didn’t, you know, bring it up with Russ. The next few weeks are just waiting. Waiting in doctors’ offices, waiting by the phone for test results. Russ and I decide that if the amniocentesis doesn’t come back clean we’ll abort. We remind ourselves there’s a chance the procedure itself will cause a miscarriage. Basically we’re trying not to get our hopes up. And we’re not telling anyone so that in case it doesn’t work out, which it probably won’t, we won’t have to—” Sandra swallowed the last of her wine, poured herself another glass. “Anyway, we’re trying to prepare ourselves. But then we make it ten weeks, twelve weeks, fourteen. I get the amnio and I don’t miscarry and it comes back clean and we’re at sixteen weeks, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four. We call our parents, we tell our friends. And now it’s real, it’s happening, this thing we’ve wanted for so long. I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a child.

  “And maybe this isn’t unexpected or unusual, but I should say,” Sandra continued, “that my pregnancy was a nightmare. Morning sickness all day for the first three months, couldn’t keep anything but saltines and Gatorade down. I started keeping—this is embarrassing but,” Sandra laughed, the sound lower and gentler, “no more embarrassing than anything else I’ve shared so far. I started keeping an empty trash can by my desk just in case I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Made sure there was always a fresh trash bag in it. I only used it a coupl
e times but that was enough, my whole cube reeked of bile for weeks. Though that could have been my imagination, I was so sensitive to smells then, if someone walked by eating a banana I’d feel nauseous for hours. And my teeth hurt. And then my hair started falling out and my nails stopped growing and somehow I was losing weight. This was in the first two, three months. Real horror-movie stuff. But so then at sixteen weeks, this is right after the amnio, I start gaining weight. A lot of weight. Fifteen, twenty pounds, like, overnight. And I keep gaining weight, more than I’m supposed to be gaining, the line on the chart is, like, exponential. And suddenly nothing fits, not even my maternity stuff, and my ankles start swelling and I’m hungry all the time, starving. I buy these enormous overalls and I start living in them when I’m not at the office. For the office I have a series of shapeless cotton dresses, these sort of really depressing curtains—I mean, you must have seen me wearing them. And Crocs. I’d squeeze my feet into flats when I had to go into meetings, but in my cube I wore compression socks under Crocs, that’s pretty much all that fit.

  “Anyway.” Sandra exhaled, set her glass, half empty, down on the table. “I’m five months pregnant. I’m so hungry after work that I’m buying an entire rotisserie chicken on my way home at least twice a week, parking my car in the driveway and picking the carcass clean, throwing the bones in the trash before I walk into the house. I’m waking up in the middle of the night and driving to diners for fried pickles and a milkshake. I’m putting ranch dressing on everything, going through a bottle or two a week. People start asking me if I’m having twins. Start telling me I look ready to pop. Saying things like You know, my kid was a couple weeks overdue, too, it’s not a big deal, sometimes they just need a little extra time to bake. And as soon as they say bake I’m thinking, Hey, it’s been twenty minutes since I last ate, I’m hungry.