by Lauren Fox
“Here I am, ladies!” Katie waddled up to our table. It had been a while since our last visit: she was hugely pregnant.
“Oh, my God,” Josie said.
Katie laughed and crossed her arms over her chest. “I guess I haven’t seen you two in a few months. But don’t worry, I won’t go into labor until after I bring you your drinks.” She paused for dramatic effect, then leaned down conspiratorially. “I’m actually only six months along. It’s twins!”
“Congratulations,” I said, and smiled like my face was being pulled apart. I’d been through this before. After my first miscarriage, I saw a pregnant woman sitting on a bench eating a sandwich, and I burst into tears. After that, except for work, I didn’t leave my house for a week. But you can’t live that way. So I taught myself how to fake it—smile, smile, smile—and it turned out not to be that hard. Practice makes perfect.
“Don’t you already have two kids?” Josie asked, aghast, and I loved her.
“Yep, sure do.” Katie rolled her eyes. “Fertile Myrtle, that’s me.”
I swiped at my face with my napkin and looked away.
Josie stood up then and swooped around to my side of the table so fast the silverware rattled. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry! I just realized I forgot something at home. I forgot my, um, my stuff…that I need. We have to leave! Is that okay with you, Iz? Do you mind? Can we go? I’m sorry, Katie.” I nodded and stood, ready to bolt.
Katie was already calmly clearing our water glasses. “Oh, gosh, don’t worry about it,” she said, a little distracted, holding the glasses with plump, swollen fingers, efficiently moving on to her next table, because this was her job, and no matter how much she liked us, paying customers were the ones who tipped. “Come back soon!” she called. She blew a stray hair away from her face. “Come back before these darn babies are born!”
I walked quickly, ahead of Josie, through the biergarten and around the building to the parking lot, where our cars were parked next to each other. The early October evening was humid, almost tropical; in a couple of weeks, the autumn cold would move in, icy and dank, and these last warm gasps would be a memory.
Josie steadied me with both hands on my shoulders and stared at my face like a lover. “Crap on a cracker,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“That pregnant bitch,” she whispered.
“I know! So rude, how she flaunts it.”
“Let’s go for a drive,” she said. “My car.”
Josie was always good at navigating, compensating for my innate directional inability. She drove everywhere, unless we didn’t care if we got lost. The compromise, though, was that she got to make the rules. “Where should we go?” she asked, and turned left out of the parking lot without waiting for me to answer.
“Why don’t we go to the maternity ward at St. Luke’s and admire some newborns,” I said. “Or let’s see what’s going on at the Mommy and Me class at Gymboree.”
“Hmmm,” Josie said, pretending to consider my suggestions. “No. Let’s do something illegal!” She slapped her palm on the steering wheel.
I turned to her. My whole life, anytime anyone suggested doing something even slightly dangerous—going for a ride on the back of a motorcycle, swimming in a lake with no lifeguard on duty, taking a particularly large bite of something—I would hear my mother’s voice: You’re my life. Helene staked her claim against the risk takers, the gamblers, the brave. We don’t do that, she would say. Please never do that.
And then came Hannah, and I understood. I was so risk averse when she was a baby that some days just crossing the street with her in my arms seemed fraught with peril. “Jose, you know I don’t—”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Josie said. “I know you don’t. And I know where I’m taking you.”
She drove through downtown, veering east along mostly deserted streets that were familiar but nevertheless confounding to me. I relaxed against the back of the seat and let her drive. An empty plastic cup rolled around on the floor at my feet. Josie’s car was the manifestation of her id: a familiar mix of candy-bar wrappers and packs of spearmint gum and empty Diet Pepsi cans and napkins, a few stray student papers, and a medium-sized purple stuffed mouse and a small stack of art magazines in the backseat. It smelled like her, coconut shampoo and vanilla oil, sugary, a little burned. I had been with her when she bought this car, years earlier, almost new. The end of it was just a few months away.
We drove for about twenty minutes in relative silence, the kind of peaceful quiet you don’t really note as unusual until it’s pointed out to you—how rare and peculiar it is to feel comfortably alone without being alone. I thought about Hannah, home with Chris. It was nine o’clock. She was almost eleven years old, but she still liked to fall asleep in our bed, and then, hours later, one of us would carry her to her own bed. Sometimes she would wake up just enough to mutter something—Mom or Thirsty or Where’s Clucky?—but mostly she would just stay asleep, slumped over and heavy on Chris’s shoulder or mine.
By the time I focused on where we were going, we were there.
She had taken me through the city and out of it, into the dark heart of the suburbs. We were coasting down one of the beachfront lanes in Porcupine Bluff, a wealthy enclave. This was a private road; NO TRESPASSING signs were posted all the way down the dark hill toward the lake. We were doing something illegal! She parked on a little promontory overlooking the water, sandwiched between another NO TRESPASSING sign and a NO PARKING one.
“Jose!” I said.
“Come on, you love it here.”
I did. We’d been coming here for years, although less often recently. Technically, you could get ticketed just for being here, but the suburban police force was an inconsistent entity. Some nights they would be out in force, lights flashing, sirens blipping, power mad and bored, with nothing better to do than order a couple of giggling women off the rocks. Other nights you could roam the wild, dark, deserted beach and feel like you were somewhere else completely—the rocky coast of Maine, or Mars.
We got out of the car and scrambled down the gradual slope to the sand. Once we were underneath the rocky outcrop, there was a little stretch of sand where we were invisible to anyone walking or driving by on the road above. Other people must have known about this spot, and the NO TRESPASSING signs seemed like they would be catnip to teenagers. But this beach was rare and untouched, the sand blown smooth and perfect. We’d never seen anyone down here besides the occasional jogger or dog walker.
Josie stood a few feet from me, staring out at the calm water. “How can this be private property?” she said. “How can twenty or thirty suburban homeowners claim this beach? Is Lake Michigan theirs, too?” She spread her skinny arms out wide as if she were reclaiming the land for all of humanity.
I shrugged. The moon was tiny and dim behind hazy clouds. The night sky, muted by those clouds, was a dirty shade of pewter. The waves thwapped against the shore, water and earth perennially fading into each other.
“We should take the kids on a field trip here,” Josie went on, riling herself up. “Oh, my God, Iz. How about that? An illegal field trip!”
It was hard to know when she was kidding about a thing like this. The Claire Whitley incident at Lake Kass was long past. Josie never wanted to talk about it—not once—and so, eventually, I had stopped trying. But it had peeled away a fine layer of her, and what was underneath was a little strange and raw. Three or four of my students had come to me just since the start of the school year with reports of Josie’s off-the-wall comments. “Don’t listen to every single thing your parents tell you,” she had said a few times, and, “Learn it for the test, you guys, and then go ahead and forget it. You will never need to know the history of the cotton gin.”
“I think that’s a fine idea,” I said. “Maybe we could take them to a bar after, and buy them cigarettes and condoms.”
She laughed, an appreciative little heh, and shoved her hands into the pockets
of her jeans.
I slipped off my shoes and walked to the edge of the lake. Josie followed. The freezing water lapped up onto our feet. Josie yelped and jumped back, but I liked the shock of it, the icy pain and then the bone ache, the way it pinned your focus. I moved back only when I couldn’t stand it anymore. And then we stood there, just quiet again in the soft darkness, for a few minutes.
“No more babies for me,” I said. I hadn’t even known I was thinking it until the words came out of my mouth. But I heard the truth of them—that it didn’t matter if Chris and I tried or didn’t, if I kept on wanting or just stopped, raged against the unfairness of the universe or managed to find peace. This was finally the end of it. I felt a wave of sadness rise in me, flood my lungs, and I squeezed my eyes shut to it. I let it have me. I was done.
“Hannah…is spectacular,” Josie said.
“I know it,” I said. I wasn’t even thinking about Hannah. I was thinking about how I had been pregnant four days ago. A Monday. I was thinking about how you could wake up in the morning in one place and then go to sleep that same night somewhere else. It was like traveling to another continent.
“Do you want to know something?” Josie said.
“Hmm?”
“It has nothing to do with this. Is that okay?”
“Yes, please.”
It was windy this close to the water but still warm, wetly cloying and a little fishy. It felt like we were being breathed on by an enormous dog. Josie pulled an elastic band from her pocket and gathered her hair into it. “I’m not telling you this so you can fix it, or to distract you from what you’re going through.” She looked at me. I nodded. “This is just something I’ve wanted to say for a while. Okay?”
With her hair pulled back, her face looked small, childlike. I nodded again. Was Josie going to tell me she was pregnant? She and Mark had never wanted children, but these things happened. Was this what she had to confess? I wrapped my arms around myself, my lonely body. Smile, smile, smile.
“Sometimes I think…sometimes I feel pretty sure that Mark and I aren’t going to stay together.” She spoke quickly, then bent and picked up a small stone and chucked it into the water.
I thought, What? and, on its heels, Oh, of course. Miscarriage, mismarriage. Nothing stays. I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“It’s not that I don’t love him. I mean, of course I do. Of course I love Mark. Who doesn’t love Mark? But sometimes I feel like I’m not meant to stay married to him.” Josie started walking, still barefoot, down the shore. I fell in next to her. “I don’t even know,” she said. She hadn’t rolled up her jeans against the water, and the bottoms were wet, indigo. “There’s nothing keeping us together, you know, the way you and Chris have Hannah. And some mornings I wake up and he’s still sleeping, and he’s snoring, or whatever…I can smell his breath, or his hair is greasy, or he rolls over and farts in his sleep.” She laughed, shuddered. “It’s all so disgusting! People! Are so disgusting! I know it’s not just him. But I think, I don’t want to be a witness to this, you know? I don’t want to spend my days next to someone just…charting the decay.”
“Wow,” I said. “Tell me how you really feel.” We were nearing the end of the beachfront before it angled up sharply to the road, where we would turn back.
“I know. It’s just…do you remember Teachers’ Convention last fall?”
She knew I did. Teachers’ Convention was the highlight of our year. A few weeks into every fall semester, we went to Madison for two long days of keynotes and focus groups and breakout sessions about everything from how to teach math to girls and how to keep at-risk boys from dropping out of high school to Integrating Drumming into the Teaching of Algebra and Curses, Cursive! and Grammar: Whom Needs It? Some of it was interesting, even enjoyable…but that wasn’t why we attended Teachers’ Convention. We went for the nights.
When I was growing up, I figured that my teachers existed solely to expand our young minds. Maybe they had interests outside of school—spouses or families or, more likely, cats—but if they had lives, they lived them, I presumed, in a minor key. Their nonschool hours were just filler, a place to sleep and maybe a microwaved meal for one until they—dedicated altruists, all of them—could bound back into the classroom where they truly belonged. If you’d shown me photos of Teachers’ Convention when I was a kid, I would have gone hysterically blind.
Those two nights in October were an orgy of raucous complaining and drunken revelry, foul-mouthed ranting, sloppy flirting, and hilarious, alcohol-fueled gossip marathons. Transgressive desires that lay dormant during the school year surfaced during those two nights. For the unattached or the ethically unbothered, those desires were made literal, although the women outnumbered the men, so there was an extra buzzy, competitive edge to it. Teachers’ Convention was a massive steam-vent, a wild party, and we giggled over the memories of it until June.
“Do you remember that social studies teacher we hung out with?” Josie continued. “Alex Cortez?”
Midmorning on the first day of the convention, Josie had gone to a session on current events, while I debated the finer points of close literary analysis with six elderly fussbudgets, three of whom sported what we called the Wisconsin perm. I’d come out flushed with a clearer understanding of how the Brontës used weather, and Josie had come out with Alex.
We all had falafels together on State Street. I accidentally dropped one on the sidewalk. Alex was a handsome, married high-school social studies teacher from Middleton whose wife was an environmental lawyer specializing in lawsuits against windmills, and until this moment on the beach, that was the last time I’d thought about him.
“Well, we struck up a sort of…friendship,” Josie said, a little dreamily. “An e-mail thing, just back and forth, the two of us. A lot of back and forth. A lot.”
We were standing at the edge of the beach now. The wind was picking up a little, blowing away the night clouds. Solid darkness had settled in. The moon was higher and fatter. Josie was barreling through this confession. I knew not to interrupt.
“We kissed once. And believe me, I feel terrible about that! But it was just a kiss. That’s all. It was nothing.” She looked down. Her lips twitched in a secret little smile she could barely contain. She was lying. “We talk about everything, though. That’s what’s amazing. Lori—his wife—was pregnant when we met, remember?” I didn’t. “And they were thinking about moving to Madison, they were tossing the idea around, and Alex was really decisive about it. One day they were thinking about moving, and then, a few weeks later, they moved. I mean, can you imagine Mark doing that? First he’d have to spend two months making a flowchart of all the pros and cons of moving. Then he’d have to spend another month researching moving companies.” Right before my eyes, Josie was molding Mark’s talents and quirks, the imperfections and habits that made him Mark, into her own unappealing little sculpture. It was like I was watching her work. “Well, I mean, nothing happened,” she said again, to the lake. “But, Iz, I think something could. If we lived in the same city. If we let it. There’s just this energy between us. Alex is so different from Mark. He’s, like, bold and eager and straightforward. He’s the anti-Mark.” She looked at me, her eyes bright. “And he paints! In his spare time. Which of course he doesn’t have that much of, since the baby was born. And he has two older girls, too, Maya and Elena, so his work’s cut out for him! But he’s a painter. An artist!”
I turned slightly away from Josie; I couldn’t keep her gaze. I clasped my hands in front of me like I was praying. I had the unaccountable feeling that all the days of my life were like the pages of a book fluttering away from me in the breeze, that I was blank, without history.
Was this how easily the ties of a marriage could be loosened? I didn’t adore Chris every day. I didn’t! Sometimes I looked at him and saw nothing more than a random collection of disgusting habits and dirty socks. The way he slurped his cereal. The dry spit on th
e corners of his mouth when he woke up. How he cringed when I got angry or upset, as if all emotions aside from gentle amusement and mild annoyance scared him. Sometimes he was unfamiliar to me, alien, a strange choice made by someone who used to be me.
Josie rocked a little on her feet. “Would you say something, please? This is really embarrassing. I’m suddenly really embarrassed.”
I had the thought that, if Josie and Mark split up, I would be one of those friends who took sides, who discarded one for the other. And I would take Mark’s side. I would be a terribly loyal friend, I realized suddenly, to Mark. I squinted against the wind, against my rising fury. “This is so fucked up,” I said to Josie, and then regretted it a little, but not completely.
She gasped. “Oh. Yeah, okay. I’m sorry, Iz. I’m sorry I said anything. I’m an idiot.” She glanced at my belly, then quickly looked away and shook her head. Her ponytail bounced like a cheerleader’s. “I’m really sorry.” Her voice was small and sad. “My timing sucks.” She jammed her hands into her pockets again and started walking. “We should get going, huh? Let’s go.”
I waited for a few seconds, let her move several paces ahead of me. It didn’t take us long to get to the other end of the beach, and we climbed back up the rocks, Josie ahead of me, quick as a goat. I had to concentrate hard on the slight, uneven incline, stepping from stone to stone, wobbling a little, righting myself. My body was off-balance, just like after my first three miscarriages, my center of gravity realigning. Josie waited for me at the car. I was out of breath. She wasn’t.
“I wish we could forget this ever happened,” Josie said to me over the top of the car.
Just before I opened the door, I scanned the dark street, half hoping to see a police car’s flashing light, to hear its siren revving up. I was wishing for a dramatic end to this, but there was nothing. It was just us and the warm, black, empty night.
···
My mother picks a bit of fluff off of her scarf and adjusts herself in her chair. A weak, liquid March light seeps in through a wall of windows. From somewhere nearby, there is the sighing, rhythmic shush of an oxygen machine. We’re in the kind of waiting room that stops time.