by Paula Bomer
BACK IN THE HOTEL, Sonia contemplates calling home, if she’s allowed to call it that, and hanging up, but thinks better of it. Katrina, dear Katrina. The thing is, nothing about Katrina could ever really surprise her. She was capable of anything, going in any direction. And Stan, oh boy. He was so hugely talented and now look. Exhausted, even as her mind races, she turns on the television and before she knows it, she’s falling asleep so she gets up, rips off her clothes and begins passing out, inhaling the clean bleach smell of hotel sheets and right before she loses consciousness, her last thought is an ache for the warm, dirty flesh smell of her bed.
“Katrina? This is Sonia. I know we haven’t talked in years …” Sonia did it. She called her and it was wonderful to hear her voice. Just wonderful.
And it’s settled. Sonia would visit. Sonia didn’t say anything about leaving her family. From their quick conversation she knows that Katrina has a little boy, Rufus. Her husband, Joe, had been in one of the local Boston bands, surely Sonia remembers him? Actually, Sonia doesn’t, but will when she sees him. She’s good with faces, bad with names. And Sonia doesn’t remember too many details from their groupie days. She remembers a wash of emotion and noise and color. But the fine lines, for the most part, were gone to her. Not that she doesn’t want to try to remember. Maybe seeing Katrina would bring back the specifics. Maybe what Sonia needs is to truly remember her life.
KATRINA’S HOUSE IS BEAUTIFUL on the outside. Gray clapboard. Like a house on the Cape. Sprawling, with white shutters. The grass is mowed. The gravel driveway tasteful and not too bumpy.
And then here comes Katrina, coming out to greet her as she pulls in the drive. She has Rufus on her hip and he seems to be nearly the size of her. She looks beautiful, her hair longer and shaggier than ever, with a thick block of heavy bangs covering her forehead. She is thin and hippy, her face so youthful that Sonia immediately feels old as shit. Sonia feels that her taste for booze and cigarettes, although greatly curtailed during this pregnancy and her other pregnancies, has aged her, and for some reason, Katrina, walking toward her with this scowling, enormous boy wrapped around her, is dewy-skinned. They hug awkwardly, Rufus and Sonia’s belly both interfering with the hug and then they walk inside.
The inside of Katrina’s house is not so nice. It smells strongly of stale pot. The couch is filthy and saggy. There isn’t much in the way of furniture and the place is cold on this mild November day. Indeed, it’s colder inside than outside. A brown shag rug, perhaps meant to be ironic, just looks sad. Joe stands in the kitchen, rolling a joint and drinking coffee. Now she remembers Joe. He played in a band called Dogweed. It was a great, loud, fast, countrified band, a three piece. They rocked. They were all short men with long hair who played their instruments with love and abandon. There had been some buzz about them at the time, labels sniffing around. Now here stands Joe himself, his hair sheared off, and he looks defeated. Sad. Maybe even scared. All that pot has made deep lines in his face. He wasn’t sexy anymore, not like Katrina.
THE WOMEN SETTLED INTO the living room, on opposite sides of the couch.
“Rufus, say hi to Katrina’s friend, Sonia,” says Katrina. Rufus scowls at Sonia and lifts up his mother’s shirt, revealing a beautiful, pear shaped breast, and starts nursing. With his other hand, he fondles his mother’s other breast. He growls quietly while he does this and looks menacingly straight at Sonia, as if she were some beast come to take away his mother.
“He’s shy,” says Katrina.
“Does he call you Katrina instead of Mommy? Because you said say hi to Katrina’s friend, you know, instead of Mommy’s,” says Sonia.
“Oh, yes. Joe and I believe in children calling their parents by their first names. We’re all people, individuals, you know? The objectification that “mommy” and “daddy,” those words, produce, we feel is very damaging.”
“Huh.” A silence falls. Fuck, thought Sonia. Katrina was always weird, it was something that was so great about her. Weird fun. Eccentric. Outside the norm.
Katrina beams at Sonia. “You are so pregnant! My goodness. And you have kids? Where are they?”
“At home, in Brooklyn, with their father.” Again, a thick silence. “I’m freaking out. I’m on a mission. A vacation. Something.”
“I could never leave my Rufus.” Katrina’s face shows horror, but barely, it’s a cute kind of horror, because her face is so damn dewy. God, what does she do to look that way?
“You know, Katrina, you look great. Your complexion, your skin …”
“I don’t smoke, I eat no meat, I don’t drink, I eat a vegetarian diet with tons of live foods. And I do colonics.”
“You mean enemas?”
“Yes. There are so many toxins in the air and water and food around us. We all have fifteen pounds of poisonous metals in us that are killing us. Literally.” Katrina strokes Rufus’ head. He no longer glares at Sonia, to Sonia’s great relief. Instead, his face is completely engulfed in the pillow of his mother’s breast. “How old are your kids?”
“Four and two. Two boys. I don’t really want to talk about it. I do miss them. I feel guilty about leaving them. But I freaked out. You see, this pregnancy was an accident.”
“My fear of accidental pregnancy is so great that I just stopped having sex. I am not ready for another baby at all. Rufus still needs me so much. The thought of it! I feel for you, I do.”
“When did you stop having sex with Joe?” Sonia whispers, even though Katrina wasn’t whispering.
“About three years ago.” Katrina says. “And don’t worry about Joe hearing us. It’s all in the open. We talk openly about everything.”
“God, no sex must be hard on your marriage.”
“Not really. He gets it somewhere else now and I don’t mind. It’s a relief, actually. Having kids changes everything. You know that.”
“What about going on the pill?”
“No way! And poison my body?”
“Well, I don’t know Katrina! Not having sex? You loved sex. You taught me how to love sex! I had never, and still have never, met anyone like you before. Someone who so unabashedly loved sex. You loved your body and men’s bodies and music and drugs and wine …”
“That was a long time ago, Sonia.” Katrina looks at her with serenity. Her mouth is set in a hard way, and for once, Sonia notices her age. “That all has to go at some point. One can’t live like that forever. We were young! I’m not young anymore. Neither are you.”
“But we’re not dead yet, are we?”
“A part of us dies when our children are born, no? Our sexual self is never the same again. Our selfishness, our energy is zapped up. A lot of us dies with the birth of a child. As it should be. Trying to cling on to youth, or life as it was before children—sex, socializing—all of that seems so sad. Or hopeless. And so, instead I put all my hope in Rufus. He deserves it. He’s going to have the childhood I never had.”
“And what exactly is that, the childhood you never had?”
“I was the third child and my mother was so overwhelmed. And how can anyone pay attention to three children? And then my mother became so miserable and she started sleeping with the neighbor’s son, a high-school boy. Then my parents got divorced.”
Sonia knew all of this back in college. Hearing it again refreshes her memory of that time. Backstage, a delicious joint being passed around. A cooler full of Rolling Rock beer. Another friend, Lola, sitting on the lap of the lead singer of Zug Zug, a band of five beautiful, sweaty young men. Zug Zug meant fuck in caveman, according to them.
Rufus stops nursing and Katrina rubs his head and kisses him. He does not look like a happy kid. He looks fearful and miserable, anemic even. He glares at Sonia.
“I feel like your son hates me.” There, she said it. Fuck Rufus’s feelings. The way Katrina talks in front of him, she wasn’t going to worry about saying the wrong thing.
“He doesn’t like visitors so much. We mostly spend our time alone, here in the house, or walking a
round the property, enjoying nature. We have four acres, so we have a lot of privacy” Katrina says.
“Do you guys have friends? I mean, you must have friends.”
“We have some of Joe’s customers—he deals weed … but, eh, not really. Friends are overrated. Family is everything.
“I understand that to a degree, but you are a person, too. And you need to be a person in the … in the world! I guess that’s how I feel. I’m out here, in the world right now. I’m letting the father of my boys take over.”
“Men are not made for child care. In hunter-gatherer cultures, the women take care of the children, while the men take care of the hunting and the government. There’s a lot we can learn from more primitive cultures. Listen, tomorrow is Sunday. Why don’t you stay the night—although I really feel like sending you back to your boys right this second …”
“I’m not going back right now. Not tonight. I will go back eventually.” Sonia feels small saying this. But it’s true and sitting here talking to Katrina makes her realize it. She can’t return yet. “We should go out, Katrina. You and me, at some local bar. Leave Rufus for a couple hours with his dad.”
“I don’t drink, Sonia.”
“We could drink club sodas. You know, just get out. I mean I love your devotion, but how often do we get to see each other?”
Katrina looks at Sonia with all her dewy, washed-out-colon energy. She smiles a smile of real generosity. “I know you think I’m crazy, Sonia. I also know that almost everyone thinks we, people like me, are crazy. But we’re sane in an insane world, you see? Thomas Szasz said that about schizophrenics. But really, it’s us, women in touch with their bodies and the humans that come forth from them, that are truly the sane ones even if people think we’re crazy. It’s really hard to be in touch with our natural selves in such a busy, technology driven world. We have to make a real effort to tune out the bad noise, the corruption of the so-called civilized world.”
“You wouldn’t have all this information about hunter-gatherer worlds and Thomas Szasz to base your ideas on if it weren’t for airplanes, universities, and Western education. That information is made available to you because of technology and Western civilization. Do you not see the irony of that?”
Katrina’s face looks pinched. Rufus has walked away from her, and disappeared into a dark room behind them. “Irony isn’t my thing, Sonia.”
“Well, do you understand the contrived nature of your ideology?” Sonia feels like an idiot even as the words leave her mouth. Ideology! Contrived nature! Who does she think she is?
“I understand you need to see it that way. That’s because you’re afraid.” The pinchedness leaves Katrina’s face. She looked serene again. “Rufus has headed back to our bedroom because he wants to nap. I better go back there to nurse him to sleep. First, I’ll show you our guest room. You’ll stay the night, won’t you?”
“I’d love to. Thanks.” There’s something about Katrina, something so magnetic, that has always drawn people to her, including Sonia. Even if her friend has changed, she still has that magic, of making you want to be around her. “One more thing. Do you still paint?”
Katrina looks straight at her. There’s no wistfulness, no regret in her face. “No. Painting is for children. I only do the work of a grownup now.”
Sonia pushes herself up from the couch. Following Katrina up the stairs and into a small room with peeling pink-flowered wallpaper, she is reminded of how she always felt following Katrina around. Big, ungainly. The ugly duckling behind the poised one. Now, here, pregnant and truly ungainly and on Katrina’s turf again—it had always been Katrina’s turf, the clubs, the parties—she feels the same again. Like an eager and stupid person, like the awkward one. A person who needs to be led.
AFTER NAPTIME, THERE’S DINNER. Katrina cooks, while Joe is in another room watching TV.
“How is it that you have a TV if you try to shut out the civilized world?” Sonia asks.
“Look—we have a TV. A stove. Indoor toilets. Although we like to camp. We camp a lot and then we really get back to nature.”
Sonia helps by cutting carrots and cauliflower and washing collard greens.
“I’m going to be frank. This dinner is going to give my pregnant ass major gas.”
“Gassiness comes from the sulfur and sulfur is so”—Katrina draws out the word—“good for you.”
Sonia eats it all, the brown rice, collard greens, carrots, cauliflower and some strange, lumpy pudding for desert. She was starved and grateful for food. But afterward, she pays the price, shamefully and painfully spends the evening in her little room, trying to spare the others from her insane gas. She comes out to say goodnight to the three of them sitting around in the damp and cold TV room, watching some violent and graphic cop show that she would never in a million years let her children watch. It’s dark. The screen glows and reflects off their three moonish faces as they turn to her and bid her goodnight.
BACK IN THE GUEST room, piles of sour blankets lay heaped atop her. Farting away in the dark, her stomach a rumbling mess, she begins to feel the baby move. Kicking, turning around in circles, a little monster inside of her. Sonia tries to breathe out of her mouth, feeling bewildered. This has happened twice now, to carry another life inside of her, and yet the weirdness, the surreal aspect of it, is still surreal. It does not feel natural. It feels ungodly. She feels terror. Pain. And then, the stink of her own self, which brings her back to the room, outside of her body, is a sort of relief. A distraction.
The door to her room slowly opens, and there, lit up momentarily in the hallway, stands Joe. He closes the door behind himself and comes and sits on the edge of the double mattress.
“Jesus, it stinks in here.”
“Sorry.”
Joe whistles as he lets out a heavy, blowing breath. “Good God.”
“Sorry! I am in here to spare your family. I’d rather be watching TV out there, but I thought it would be cruel of me. I can’t eat cauliflower when I’m pregnant. Or collard greens, for that matter.” She pauses. “What you are doing here?”
“Oh, I think you know what I’m doing here.”
Sonia tenses, the baby flips around and kicks her in the ribs, and then Sonia farts again. Her eyes begin adjusting again, after being blinded by the hallway light. She sees Joe’s nose, thin and handsome, pointed toward her. The dark of his eye sockets. His small hands folded neatly in his lap.
“I don’t know what you’re doing in here. But if I were you, I wouldn’t be in here. Unfortunately, I am me, and I can’t leave myself in here.”
“You should try meditating or levitating or whatever Katrina does to transport herself out of her body. She’s really into meditating.”
“Katrina must know you are in here. Joe. This is weird.”
“She might know and she might not. She may think I’m out in the garage or still in the TV room. Or in my bedroom. Rufus and she went to bed in their bedroom.”
“I see.”
Joe delicately refolds his hands. “When Katrina was pregnant, she was insanely horny all the time.”
“Yes, I was like that during my first pregnancy. And a little during my second pregnancy, although it was harder to have sex all the time because I had my first kid around.”
“And this time? How are you feeling this time? I am here, by the way, to fuck you if you want. Even if the room stinks like a nasty factory town.” He reaches a hand out to her and puts it on her ripe pregnant-lady breast. Just like that, no rubbing of the shoulder, no gentle pat. He just lifts his hand and puts it directly on her breast.
“I don’t think so, Joe.” Something stirs in Sonia. Is she thinking of getting laid? Then, another fart flies out of her.
“God. What is wrong with me?” says Joe, his hand still on her breast. “Why has it come to this? Don’t get me wrong, I always thought you were attractive, in that skinny, bendable way. I don’t like that you’re four inches taller than me. But whatever. What should I do? Leave Katrina
? I love her. I love my son.”
“Shit. I don’t know, Joe. Have you thought about counseling?”
“Counseling isn’t going to change Katrina’s belief system. Nothing will, unless she adopts a new belief system all on her own. I have no power over her, Sonia. I never have and it was a good thing in the past. A woman with a mind of her own. You know? I didn’t want to marry some doormat.”
“Can you take your hand off my breast?”
He leans over and puts his face close to hers and grips her breast more tightly. “Let me fuck you.”
“No.”
“Just touch my dick.”
“Joe. I can’t.”
He pulls back up to sitting and takes his hand off her breast. Then he removes a stub of a joint and lights it, the match illuminating his handsome features for a moment. “You know, you always thought you were too good for me, didn’t you? A college girl. You never gave my type the time of day, really. We were just a stop on your way upward, weren’t we? High-school dropout rock kids. Your little toys. Fuck. And now, you think you were right to be so superior to us back then. I’m just some small-time pot dealer, right? You were right about us, weren’t you?”
“Listen, I don’t give a shit how you make your money and that’s got nothing to do with why I won’t fuck you. Katrina’s my friend. You’re her husband.”
“She’s not your friend anymore and she would be grateful to you for fucking me. You just don’t want to fuck me.”
“Alright! Whatever. Give me a break. I’m pregnant and I’ve run away from home and my ass is on fire! Don’t torment me anymore.”
“Fine.” His lips seem to be quivering. “I understand. I do.” He takes another drag of his joint and then puts it out on the tip of his tongue. It hisses. The smoke momentarily relieves Sonia of the sulfur smell coming out of her body. She breathes in deeply the smoky, herbaceous smell through her nose.
“I’m sorry, Joe. OK? I’m sorry,” she says at his back, as he slips out the door.
IN THE MORNING, SONIA wakes late. She dreamt of her boys, of being with them in their apartment in Brooklyn. It was a quiet dream, a small, comforting dream. It took her awhile to remember where she was. Suddenly, she feels very pregnant. That’s how it is, overnight, her stomach muscles had loosened and her belly now protrudes outward in a way it didn’t the day before. Perhaps it was the workout her intestines went through, but her belly, in one night, has become very large. There is no mistaking it now. She gets up and her crotch feels heavy, newly so, and as she walks out to the bathroom she feels as if she is starting to waddle. The pregnancy waddle. There is a relief in this. A strange sort of relief that it’s progressing and that it would, someday, be over.