THE STORY OF OF
In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma rearranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points at her stomach, where the chicken’s meat now resides. She’d once seen a picture of a hen in a science book. Remember? The hen had been split open down the breast, unzipped like a parka. Inside was a chain of eggs, rubbery as tapioca, small getting smaller. Nothing like the basket of fried chicken Norma has just finished eating, but sickening. Yes, sickening, a ride going round and round. You can’t make it stop.
Norma’s husband’s brother’s wife, Damica, sits across the table bouncing The Baby on her knee. Outside, automobiles are stopping at the stop sign. Some go left, some keep right on going.
Damica’s talking. “If it’s all the same to you I’ll—”
“It’s never all the same,” Norma says, thinking of the chain of eggs. “It changes a tiny bit every time.”
But Damica keeps talking. “—I’ll just get your lunch tomorrow, ’cause all I have is a twenty.”
Dead Elm Street is not a dead-end street. Hand on a butter knife, Norma cuts the street in half. Procreation by division, just like the amoebae.
The waitress stops by the table. “You girls need anything else?”
“No,” Damica says. “Just the check.”
“Do you have any walnuts?” Norma asks.
“Walnuts?”
“Walnuts,” Norma confirms.
“No,” the waitress answers. “No walnuts, no pecans, no filberts. No nuts.”
“Walnuts?” Damica asks.
“They get you pregnant.”
“Walnuts get you pregnant?”
“I read it on the Internet.”
Damica curls her mouth into a half-smile like she’s saying, I doubt it. Damica is very pretty, part Dutch, part Puerto Rican, but all of her good looks didn’t make her a genius, so Norma wonders what the hell Damica might know about the health benefits of walnuts. Nothing, she decides. Nothing.
The Baby burps. Damica plants some Eskimo kisses on her newborn’s nose. The Baby does not have a name yet, and its namelessness makes The Baby seem larger than it is, like a hairless, diapered buffalo on her sister-in-law’s lap, having a sip of formula.
They can’t decide and, rather than narrowing, the list of possible baby names grows each day. Part of the problem is that her husband’s brother, Scott—or his name used to be Scott before he changed it to Rider—is very creative. Highlights from the list of names include: Potemkin, Shade, Marble, Electric, Trouble, America, Nautica, Chrysanthemum, Fraction, Frame, and Plaid.
“Nautica?” Norma asked.
“Rider says it means ocean.”
Norma thinks it just means sportswear.
Norma and Damica eat lunch together nearly every day, so they don’t always have to talk. They are used to each other the way people are used to their TV sets. The hum keeps them warm even if they aren’t listening to the broadcast.
Damica was once Damica LaMotteo, but now she and Norma, having married brothers, have the same last name, far less beautiful than LaMotteo. Norma and Damica Jonsen. Plain, but it presents a united front like a uniform Norma puts on every morning, and since Norma has recently lost her job, a uniform feels all right.
Norma enjoys these lunches. If she weren’t here, she’d be glued to her computer, reading posts on Trying to Conceive (TTC) chat rooms.
baby37: thanks to clomid I tried to shove my husband down the stairs yesterday.
infertilems.: just found out health insurance won’t pay for my three $15,000 IVFs that didn’t work
wannabb: implantation bleeding? anyone?
baby37: implantation bleeding is a myth spread by women who have no trouble conceiving. there’s no such thing, wannabb. that’s your period
whynotme: had one HSG, one D&C and am now using both OPK and BBT while TTC. Any advice?
Norma hasn’t had any tests. She’s never even spoken to her doctor about what is wrong. She knows what’s wrong, or at least she thinks she knows what’s wrong, why she can’t have a baby of her own, and it isn’t something she wants to talk to her doctor about. “Ted’s cheating on me.”
The Baby sits up quickly and draws its eyes wide open, staring across the table at Norma, surprised, the way sleeping cats realize they need to be somewhere else and dash out of a room. The Baby stares at Norma. Norma stares back. All it takes to make a pair of eyeballs is a mother and a father. No Japanese porcelain facility, no Silicon Valley tech lab.
“Oh, come on, Norm. Not this again. Come on.” Norma brings up the topic of Ted’s alleged cheating a lot.
“Why not? Because I have no proof? That doesn’t mean he’s not.”
Ted works all the time. He says he has to, to make the payments on their mortgage, but Norma didn’t even want the stupid mortgage in the first place. Ted recognized a role and started playing it. A few summers back he convinced Norma that they should move into a new development called Rancho de Caza. “Temporarily,” he said. “We won’t spend our whole life living in a development.”
When they moved in, Rancho de Caza was not a gated community. Norma insisted on that. But then the burglaries started and after a thirty-eight-year-old mother from Lilac Lane was lashed to a kitchen chair with duct tape and thrown into her belowground swimming pool, the board of Rancho de Caza changed their minds. Even though the woman lived.
Now when Norma walks home she must stand in front of the guardhouse, wave to the man inside, and then wait while he swings open the wrought-iron gates, big enough for an eighteen-wheeler. Norma, tiny and weak as a mouse, scurries down Day Lily.
* * *
Norma pulls today’s paper from her purse. Bypassing the front page’s headlines, she flips to page eleven, where her favorite column appears. The local political beat—town hall, zoning boards, Department of Waste Management–type concerns. Lately, Harrison Nembridge, reporter-at-large, has been following a trademark case. Nembridge’s stories are poorly written, full of attendance rosters and incomprehensibly dry legal terms. Still, Norma’s hooked because the case has universal ramifications in a way very few things in her small city do.
The plaintiff is a man named Drake, a onetime lawyer who’d caught the entrepreneurial spirit three years ago when, in his spare time, he began trademarking words from the English language, claiming them for his own use within a certain-mile radius of Norma’s city. He chose simple words like “best” or “with” or, his money maker, “the.” Drake’s represented by the lawyer Linda Kanakas. Linda was two classes ahead of Norma in grade school and Linda was a tough one. The sort of girl everyone knew. Linda was a bully, and while it hasn’t been proven, there was a rumor that when Linda was in junior high she called Immigration Services to report an undocumented man, Hector Donoso. Hector’s daughter, Mary, was dating a debate team star Linda had her eye on. Hector was deported back to Honduras. Mary and her mother had to move into Section 8 housing in another district.
The defendant in the Drake copyright case is Marguerite Eddell, Jim Eddell’s widow. Eddell now owns her dead husband’s auto parts store, House of Mufflers. Linda and Drake are suing Eddell for the unattributed use of the word “of” in all company materials and advertising.
“I have to go,” Damica says. “Will you hold The Baby for a second?”
Norma looks over the edge of the paper. “Yeah. Sure. Just let me pee.” She folds the newspaper.
The stalls of the ladies’ room are made of cool aluminum. Norma rests her head against this coolness while she pees. In the stall wall she can see a distorted reflection. The dark chestnut hair dye she tried last month looks black, and her now black hair, against her pale skin, makes every minor bump and blemish on her face red and raw as if she’d been picking at the imperfections.
Norma is thinking about Damica’s twenty-dollar bill. Norma is wondering why her sister-in-law never pays for lunch. Then Norma feels something peeling away. A streamer of blood sinks to the bottom of the toilet bowl, a dark, dead fi
sh.
* * *
When Norma once asked Damica how long it took her to get pregnant, Damica said, “I don’t know. How long does it take? Fifteen minutes?” So Norma said, “No. I mean, how many times did you have to try?” And Damica said, “Try? What do you mean, honey?”
Norma and Ted have been trying for over two years. Each time Norma gets her period, strength leaks out of her. Iron and blood. Sex feels like death.
She can hardly blame Ted for finding a girlfriend. Maybe she should look for a boyfriend. Maybe he could get her pregnant. Maybe none of this matters at all—love, babies, marriage.
She rests her forehead on the aluminum. She pokes her belly sharply. “Wake up.” She speaks to her ovaries, imagining them as something crinkled and squished, like the wicked witch’s feet underneath the tornado house. GIVE ME A CALL. 1-800-FUCKIN’A is scratched into the bathroom wall. Still seated on the toilet, Norma digs her cell phone out from the bottom of her purse. She dials.
“Hello?”
“Hi. 1-800-FUCKIN’A?”
“No, I’m sorry. You’ve reached 1-800-DUBL-INC. Doubles Incorporated, providing goods and services for the Procreation by Division Industries.”
“Procreation by division?”
“Yeah. You know, like the amoebae.”
Norma hangs up quickly.
* * *
Norma pays for Damica’s lunch and on her walk home she takes a left off Dead Elm Street onto Larre Road, pronounced “Larry.” Norma presses her fingers hard into the corners of her eyes. Crying is something she started doing after the first year of trying to have a baby. Now she is really good at crying. She doesn’t even have to practice in front of the mirror anymore. Larre Road is a great place to cry, as very few people come this way.
Her city allowed for generous strips of grass between the sidewalks and the street. These greenways are mandatorily maintained by the business or homeowner who lives nearby. They have in the past been canvases for competing civic landscaping pride. But down here on Larre Road there are no businesses. There are old farms and fallow fields. The sidewalks make reverse mohawks through tall yellow grass high as Norma’s waist. If a car were to drive past, Norma would appear to be swimming in a sea of yellow and green. That is, if Norma didn’t duck down and hide in the grass each time a car approached.
Norma no longer owns a car because no one told her to change the oil. They kept that information a big secret and she ruined the engine of the used Ford Escort Ted had bought her. She blew the head gasket. Now she can’t stand people who have cars that work. Everyone has a baby and everyone drives a car with perfectly functioning air conditioners. No one has their windows rolled down. They want to make sure their babies are comfortable in their air-conditioned car seats.
A little killing bit each day.
Shutting off one nostril at a time, Norma blows her nose into the grass. Then her crying is over for today.
Larre Road is not a direct route home, but it is quiet and golden for now. The housing developments haven’t moved in here yet, though telltale plastic orange surveyor’s ribbons dot the way. They’ll be here soon. In recent years the city has been spreading out, grabbing land like a desperate hand sinking in quicksand, trying to take all the ground down with it. Soon there will be nothing left that is unknowable, unlit, and mysterious. There will be no more of the dark dark.
Today Larre Road is deserted and sunny. It is warm and peaceful. It reminds Norma of junior high, after lunch. She’d return to her classroom to find that the afternoon activity included a filmstrip. “Digestion and You,” or “Mammals!” As the teacher dimmed the lights Norma would slip into a trance that wasn’t sleep but borrowed from sleep’s best aspects, like being able to fly or make out with the kid seated behind you, and no one else in class would see your young bodies writhing together underneath the desks in a mass of sixth-grade flesh. Larre Road is a secret tunnel back to a land of peaceful, warm sixth-grade afternoons. Norma can almost hear someone saying, “Psst. C’mon. This way.” And into the tunnel she goes.
A rustling speeds up behind her quickly. From around the bend in the sidewalk comes a woman riding a boy’s BMX bike. The woman’s age is hard to guess. Her face is sharp. The blades of her cheekbones could cut, as they’ve been accentuated by two brutish swaths of rouge, leaving sallow caverns around her mouth. The woman wears her hair feathered back with a rolled bandana across her forehead. Olivia Newton John, let’s get physical. The woman looks tough, dirty, and perhaps a bit deformed. Her eyes are watery and distracted as a drug addict’s. Her body is disconcertingly tiny, like a ten-year-old body has been grafted onto a forty-year-old head.
Norma doesn’t know this woman so she thinks prostitute, no, drug dealer. No, prostitute.
They are the only two people on Larre Road but the woman stares straight ahead as if Norma weren’t there at all. The woman clenches a cigarette between her lips, one hand on the handlebars, one hand dangling by her side. She doesn’t blink, and in a fast breeze she glides past Norma and is gone.
Creepy, Norma thinks, but creepy like a humongous pile of insects crawling on top of one another, a pile of insects Norma would want to poke from afar with a long stick.
Larre Road changes from meadow to pine forest. The air turns damp and the sidewalk is darker with moss. The sky is blocked by pine boughs that keep her best thoughts from escaping up into the atmosphere. She follows Larre Road up to the driveway of the old hospital. It’s been closed for twenty years. When she was a kid, she’d heard it was haunted. The hospital sits like a gray frog on top of a small hill. Its windows are fenced by wrought iron. It was built as a mansion in 1927 by the explorer Dirmuid Grady, after a trip through the Sangla Valley, where Grady and his party had been looking for Shangri-la, the forbidden and fictional city. Of the twenty-seven people in Grady’s outfit, five returned alive. The others had been picked off by illnesses and accidents as if they were a dish of hard candies God was enjoying one by one.
Grady built this gray frog of a house and lived in it for seven months before he himself tripped on an unsecured flagstone, tumbled into the empty concrete swimming pool, and landed in the deep end.
The state bought the mansion for nothing and turned it into a hospital for troubled minds. When Norma was thirteen, the last doctor presided over the last troubled mind, a man named Walter, who confessed he wasn’t actually troubled but had come to the sanitarium because he was lonely. The doctor proposed that the two of them should enter retirement together somewhere in the tropics. Walter, the patient, agreed. Page eleven reported the story.
Norma scuffles up to the Institute, unsure if it’s trespassing.
A BMX bicycle with fluorescent-green tires has been deposited in the grass by the front door. One wheel spins slowly in the breeze. The warm afternoon. Larre Road feels intimate like a password whispered down a phone line made from two paper cups and a piece of string. Norma thinks, That terrifying toadish mouse of a woman is waiting inside. Maybe she has come to meet her married boyfriend. This derangement of the mind is something that happens to women whose husbands cheat on them: the world begins to overflow with people, animals, aunts and uncles all having sex. Everywhere, fucking is going on. The world is an algae-covered pond in spring and Norma alone is standing on the dry bank.
Through a narrow pane of glass by the front door, she sees the tile’s been ripped up in a few spots. Water has stained the wallpaper brown but it doesn’t look too scary inside. There’s sunlight and debris that is nearly modern, an ashtray, a clunky remote control, a pair of Naugahyde chairs. A chain that once secured the doors closed dangles in the breeze.
Norma slips inside. “Hello?”
No one answers.
The air in the sanitarium is holding on to winter. Norma backs herself up against the foyer wall, standing very still, like a moth against mottled bark, blending in. Her eyeballs beat left, right, left, right. She calls again, “Hello?”
No one answers.
The house sme
lls foul, a mouth of rotten teeth. The air’s not been stirred in a long time and whatever’s in the basement (dead bodies, raccoon poop) lingers. Most furnishings have been stolen or damaged by bad kids throwing parties in the old house. They wrote their names, the devil’s names, their sweethearts’ names on the walls. They peed in the corners, liberated the fire axe from its glass box and splintered a large reception desk with it. One wall has a chair sticking straight out of it, all four legs reamed into the plaster. Still, there are remnants of a former glory. Ornate moldings whose details hold hope for a better future, eight different colors of Italian marble, and a mantel raised on the back of a carved oak deer. Norma wonders how long it took to build such a house. A long time.
The central staircase twists smoothly. “Hello?” she calls again, but there is no answer. Many of the banister’s supports have been kicked free. From the landing she can see out the back window to what must have once been the pool. After an accident involving some schoolgirls, the town filled the hole with dirt, leaving a square cement corona.
Upstairs she looks left and right. The wings are identical hallways filled with doors. Norma goes right.
“Hello?” she says, nervous now. She glances behind herself, then up. Directly above her the ceiling is stained. A large brown mass of dripping discoloration has spread out in uneven rings. There must be a leak. She circles below, neck craned backward, arms linked across her chest. She’s mesmerized, as though the blob were telling her the long secrets of such a stain, thirty-six years of leaking into a mark as dark and deep as this one. Thirty-six years is exactly as long as Norma has been alive. No wonder she feels so empty. Norma exhales. Norma rights her head. And there she is. Standing no more than a narrow foot away. The prostitute/drug dealer stares at Norma as if she is hungry.
“Hello,” Norma says.
“What are you doing?”
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