The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

  “Kyla?” Gabrielle shifted some papers around on her desk, fidgeted with her plastic conception wheel the way the newly married finger their rings. “Statistically, the procedure is the best plan of action.”

  Kyla and Lyle looked at each other and then nodded.

  “Let’s do it.” Kyla eased the words out, wishing she had agreed on something, anything else—a party theme, a yes to the college formal, the proposal Lyle had given her, a resounding sure after he’d tried earlier to sell her on the idea of having babies young. After the scheduled cesarean, she would not go home with the baby and Lyle but would remain in the hospital until Obstetrics had cleared her and Neurology had wheeled her away.

  “I like the terms she uses,” Kyla said to Lyle in the car on the way home. “Aggressive—like there’s a hostile takeover in my head. And debulking. Good word.”

  “I think that’s just the medical term,” Lyle said. The skin under his eyes felt engorged, his shirt was still wet.

  “Oh. I thought maybe Gabrielle made that up—you know, to sound poetic.” Kyla thought of the aggressive girls in grade school, how her mother had used that word to describe them when what they really had been was cruel. Then she thought of onion rolls and imagined they were the shape and size of the tumor, bulbous and soft, in need of debulking.

  Up ahead, bursts of red and yellow on the road median’s hibiscus plants were their own stop and slow signals. Lyle pulled the car over to the roadside and put his arms around Kyla, who thought to pull the emergency brake up while the car stalled and Lyle’s face burrowed into the space between her collarbone and chin. She cried a bit, and then, when Lyle kept nuzzling, she laughed.

  “That tickles,” she said.

  “Come on,” Lyle said, annoyed and not yet guilty for it.

  He knew Kyla would react this way, calm and funny, her slight distance making his emotions seem garish and whiny. It had been the same when they got together—he totally knocked over by her wit, her orange-zested salmon, the way the tops of her breasts seemed to escape the netting of her bra, the way she’d loved him so suddenly. She’d been unruffled, happy but poised.

  “I want to name her Rey,” Kyla said, her voice soft as she looked out the window. Sparrows and a couple pigeons rummaged in the wood-chipped mulch.

  “Oh, Ky.” Lyle put his face in his hands. She had been insisting on naming the baby Mavis, after the great-aunt who’d taught Kyla to tell a plum tomato from a cherry, who had pickled Bolivian Rainbows and showed her how to dice them with capers for a fish sauce. But Lyle and Kyla had met in Marina del Rey and had joked then about the name, about having three kids—Marina, Del, and Rey. Now, there could be only one.

  Lyle and Kyla stayed there on the side of the road letting cars and SUVs pass, sometimes honking, as they held hands. Kyla took out a sheet of paper and wrote “Rey” in various fonts, swirled and loopy like on a celebrity kid birthday invite, block-lettered stout like she’d used for the autism fund-raiser the year before, and then bubbled, like on a fifth-grader’s Mother’s Day card.

  “Which will be more like her?” she asked Lyle. “Will we have a script girl or a capitals-only printer?”

  Years later, Lyle would show the lettered paper to Rey as she tried to make a cover for her fourth-grade autobiography entitled “All About Me.” She copied her mother’s loops and lines and set the paper aside while Lyle glued a photograph on the cover from when Rey had been born. Rey, swaddled in a yellow cotton blanket; Kyla had held her daughter at arm’s length, on display for the camera before the edema had increased. All the fluids had leaked into her veins, and Kyla’s small chin had swollen, her face bulbous and smooth like the surface of an egg. She’d felt her cheeks and asked for a hand mirror.

  “I may be puffy, but there’s not a wrinkle in sight,” she’d said. The blue-and-green patterned gown had reminded Lyle of his algebra textbook’s Escher-print cover, where lizards had overlapped one another until he couldn’t tell what was tail and what was snout.

  It was this image, the sweat-lined lip and johnny-clad body, Lyle thought of while he helped Rey finish her homework.

  “You can tell me something about her, if you want,” Rey said. She didn’t always want to know, and Lyle closeted away details until Rey allowed him to spill them. She put her finger on the photographed nose of her gone mother as if expecting it to beep.

  “She liked cool baths,” he said. “And she ate tomatoes like you’d eat an apple.”

  “Yuck,” Rey said. She pictured biting and spurting seeds, dripping juice. “You already told me about the bath part.”

  “Well.” Lyle swallowed a sip of lemonade. He wondered when he would run out of stories, when the clips of Kyla would recede, failing him and their daughter.

  “Oh—I have one!” he said. “After her surgery, she forgot lots of stuff. You know, names of people and if milk was called milk or something else.”

  Rey listened, looking up at her father’s wide hands as he gestured. “Then,” Lyle continued, “I made her lunch one day—grilled cheese on potato loaf with a pickle on the side.”

  “That’s my favorite!” Rey said. Lyle loved how Rey could make comments like this and, having not been a witness to the actual loss of Kyla, sound happy. It was, he realized, the same tone Kyla had after her surgery—placid, happy, as if all the evil in the world happened to someone else, nearby.

  “I know. Mine, too, but I like Swiss and you like that processed American goop—just like Mom,” Lyle said. “But Kyla—Mom—didn’t want the pickle I’d served her on the side. Didn’t even want it on her plate. But she couldn’t think of how to say that.”

  Lyle looked at his daughter and took her whole face in his hands as if he hadn’t ever seen her until now. “And then—you know what she did? Kyla said, ‘In the theater of my life, this pickle has no role!’” Lyle laughed and looked at the cover of Rey’s now-pasted book.

  Lyle looked at his daughter, their daughter, and tried for one moment to see her as a woman, a decade or two from now, then instantly stopped himself so the future Rey dissipated and the ten-year-old came back with too-large teeth and wide forehead. The one who didn’t yet really miss her mother. The daughter whose only assignment was to write the “All About Me” that summed up only one decade.

  “In the theater of my life, this pickle has no role,” Lyle repeated, and Rey joined in on the last couple words.

  “I know just what she meant,” Rey said and nodded.

  In the Herd of the Elephants

  Smiling Cadillac wide, Julia Roberts stares out from the television. She’s riding on top of an elephant somewhere—Thailand, maybe—and manages to look graceful, hair piled up, and unfazed by the heat. In their eighth and ninth months, Lucy and Jenna are considerably less cool; sweat dollops run their jagged course from Lucy’s temple to her jaw while perspiration seeps through Jenna’s bra, oozing from the underwire until she can feel it on her stretched stomach.

  Bloated like a pair of bullfrog cheeks, they are nevertheless sitting right next to each other, not bothering to leave a space in between.

  “I wish I had a trunk,” Lucy says, putting her forearm to her nose and flinging her wrist. “I would splash myself in a water hole.”

  They debate the merits of a trunk versus a marsupial pouch, then drink the last of their Russian iced tea. Lucy’s mother made a jug of it—loose tea tied in cheesecloth sacks submerged into hot water—and stuck it in the fridge, and they’ve been sipping at the ginger-orange of it until their tongue tips are slightly burning.

  “What about Ella?” Jenna says to Lucy.

  They still haven’t settled on names for the babies—now too big to swirl inside them so they just punch and roll—and the women are desperate enough these days that they look to everyday objects or anyone they encounter to see if they can pick something suitable: Lottie was the bag packer at Shaw’s market, Jinelle was the vacuum brand Lucy thought sounded good for a girl. The Baby Romaine from their salads didn’t seem right
for a child, but they decided it would work for the rock group they’d never form.

  “Ella’s nice,” Lucy says. “You could have Ella and I could have Louie.”

  They don’t know if they are carrying boys or girls or one of each, but the husbands, who both work on the farm, have a feeling they’ll soon be surrounded by a herd of females. Today they sift through the harvested brussels sprouts and bunch the snap beans into crates to be shipped. When they come home, linted with cornhusks, Jenna and Lucy’ll go out to the truck, see what remnants they’ve got in back, and fashion dinner out of the bruised tomatoes or button mushrooms.

  On the television, Julia heads into the jungle to be with orangutans, leaving the heft of elephant she rode on to wait in the dusty shade.

  “There’s only two kinds of elephants,” Jenna says. “The Asian elephant and the African—the African’s the biggest, so that’s me.”

  “Give me another couple weeks,” Lucy says, still facing the screen. “Then we’ll see. You’ll be in labor and I’ll be sitting here, sweating and packing on the pounds.”

  Since Jenna is due three weeks before she is, Lucy is terrified her friend might have the baby and suddenly leave her behind, back in the world of the nonparenting.

  “Maybe we’ll go at the same time,” Jenna says to try to make her feel better, even though it’s best if she is full term. The last thing she’d want is to have Lucy stuck in the NICU while Jenna’s home breast-feeding on the couch.

  Lucy perks up. “Maybe we will! Can’t you see it? The guys running back and forth, checking on us, comparing how much dilation.”

  They joke about being crops the men need to tend, about wetting through the pickup’s seat when their waters break, or the way Jenna’s husband’s face would curl up if he were rushing her to the hospital, driving with his chest pressed to the wheel the way he did when the main pipe burst and nearly flooded the cabbage crop two years ago.

  Jenna flips channels for a minute to look at the weather, which annoys Lucy. “Can’t you just leave it? You know it’s still hot out, so why bother checking?” she asks. She fans herself with a paper towel and then says, “This isn’t working.”

  “Hey—what about Windy or Cloudy or Cirrus?” Jenna asks, going back to their name game.

  “Cirrus isn’t bad—for a boy.”

  “Those are ice clouds,” Jenna says and then, feeling the need to explain herself, “I only know this because I watch the Weather Channel too much.”

  She tells Lucy about thin stratus clouds, which sheet the sky; the patchy altocumulus ones, which are made of water but hardly ever produce rain, and the mammatus clouds, which have pouch-like shapes hanging out like bosoms.

  “Hey—we’re mammatus,” Lucy says and makes Jenna turn back to the animals.

  Back at the documentary, one of the orangutans is old and might not make it until the end of filming. Movie-star Julia is clearly upset and watches mothers bug-pick their children to feel better while the gray-haired one ails in the distance. Lucy starts to cry when Julia talks to the camera about her experience in the jungle, about how it changed her, how she liked watching the primates use sticks to fish a row of ants out from a hole in a log, how surprised she was by the way the group communicated.

  Seeing Lucy cry makes Jenna start. When they watched a documentary about seagulls, they learned that depending on the species and where they lived, a quarter of all newly paired gulls split up. Lucy’s first fiancé died in the water, and when the seabirds dove in, beaking for their dinners, alone and away from their mates, Lucy told Jenna again about how part of her still missed Matt. Here she was, married to Justin and having a baby, but the slice of her that still loved Matt would always wonder what love and children would have been with him. Maybe those feelings will trickle away, Jenna thinks, thin out and fade as Lucy gets further into life with Justin, when the baby is born.

  Jenna knows what Lucy means, though, the curiosity about what might have been. This pregnancy is her fourth. The first three didn’t take. Actually, Jenna knows the first one wouldn’t have worked at all—it wasn’t with her husband but with her first fiancé, Hull, who went off to teach an outdoor course in Colorado the summer after their engagement and never came back.

  Jenna’s real husband, Jay, saw her heaving behind the bakery before Hull had gone. He stopped his truck and offered help she didn’t take until about a year later, when she burned an arm making rolls and he drove her to the emergency room. At their wedding, each guest left with a loaf of braided molasses, the same kind she’d been making when Jay came to her rescue.

  Jenna didn’t meet Lucy until a year later, when she was pregnant again and Lucy was mourning Matt, working part-time on the farm. Jenna could say Lucy is the sister she never had, but it’s different than that. All her life Jenna felt she deserved a friend like Lucy, who fit the way she wanted with a husband, a woman Jenna knew she wanted to spend her life with. When she saw Lucy, crouching in the bulbous pumpkins that fall, and then later, wiping tears back as she hedged the shrubs at the farm’s entryway, Jenna knew she’d found her. Jenna raked the clippings up for Lucy and listened to her talk about the engagement, about her unused law degree, about her guilty crush on Justin, who had been Matt’s good friend. Only later did they realize they’d both known Kyla, a girl who’d hurt them both, who had also dated Justin, leaving him for Lucy to find later.

  “Hey, look, she’s back on the elephant,” Lucy says, pointing to Julia Roberts, who has to leave the jungle and head back to Los Angeles, where there are people instead of orangutans.

  “She looks so different without the makeup and lighting,” Jenna says.

  “She looks really awake,” Lucy says.

  She puts her hand on Jenna’s baby-belly, its stretched birthmark unseen underneath her T-shirt, and Jenna touches hers. Jenna remembers the elephant footage they saw the year they’d first met, when Jenna was miscarrying again and again and Lucy still slept in Matt’s ripped T-shirts. The elephants slugged along the dry land, females remaining with females as the males went out to live independently. The bulls liked to be alone, or didn’t know how not to be, and they long-distance-communicated only when it was time to mate. There wasn’t a set breeding season for them, and the cows stayed in heat only three to six days at a time, so the process was tricky.

  Jenna remembers Lucy saying, “Can you imagine having a pregnancy last for nearly two years?” And how that made her cry since she couldn’t hold on to hers for longer than five months. But now she can imagine it: living huge and round for another couple of months, walking ill-balanced but with a whole other person inside. In the elephant documentary they watched, they saw a cow birth a too-weak calf. The herd needed to migrate toward water, and the mother elephant had to leave her baby’s unmoving body to dry and disintegrate in the sun. Each year that same mother, buoyed by her female friends, revisited that place and stood for a while, remembering the baby she didn’t get to have.

  “Borneo,” Jenna says reading the credits on-screen. “They were in Borneo, not Bali.”

  “Let’s go make something for dinner,” Lucy says and pulls Jenna up by both upper arms, the way you do when someone’s drowning.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jenna says and exhales hard, blowing the hairs off her forehead. They walk—hands linked like they’re walking trunk to tail—into the kitchen, where there’s bread rising, and stay there together, just like this.

  Behind the Vines: A Note from the Author

  The people in these stories introduced themselves to me individually; I like to think of their collective stories as a map of sorts, the way that one place or person in your life pulls you to the next, then reloops you into a friendship you had that faded, or a place you’d left and now revisit.

  Lucy was first—she appeared as she is in “Early Girls,” at the gym, holding on to the teats of a big yoga ball—and I knew something had happened to her, but it wasn’t until well into the title story, “Early Girls,” that I knew exactly what h
er loss was. Lucy led to her mother, Ginny, and to Justin, though he came to life first in “Kindling.” The way Lucy meets Justin through Kyla is how I met him, too. Later, Justin led to Matt, but before all this was Jenna, whom I first wrote about in “Voler.” Originally, I had planned on the focus of “Voler” to be solely on Heather, but it turned out to be Jenna’s story of coping just as much—if not more—with her friend’s backstory as with the track of her own life.

  Gabrielle, with her slight remove and wish for connection, presented herself clearly as a girl in “Animal Logic.” As I continued to write the book, the grown-up character of Gabrielle kept pleading to be written, her relationship with her father explored, her need to keep moving coupled with a desire for permanence that is doubly threatened by Diane and her father’s health, and secured in the end by Danny, her son, and by the math in which she finds relief.

  I knew about Justin and his friendship with Matt before I knew Justin and Lucy would wind up together. I also wanted to see what it was like to write about someone losing a fiancé—Matt—and the loss of that love and beginning while also touching on the fact that Matt wasn’t necessarily faithful. Does it change the perspective we have for Lucy? Or does it not matter because Matt’s death overshadows other issues?