by Miriam Cohen
Dr. Altman doesn’t answer, but she does sit down beside Sophie. The clock shows they’re out of time. Sophie waits for Dr. Altman to say something, stand up, return to herself. When Dr. Altman stands up, Sophie will be able to breathe. When Dr. Altman stands up, Sophie will too, and she’ll run out of the office and into the outside air, and breathe. But for now, Dr. Altman doesn’t stand up. For now, she sits with Sophie and they abide together, Dr. Altman, Sophie and this newly-forming creature whose heartbeat she has not yet heard.
LITTLE HIPPO
The academics’ children are all bizarre. Reading already at four, siblings who say, the one to the other, “Let’s do teamwork,” and clean up without being asked. They are all dressed in colors that don’t match. Elizabeth has moved to town only recently, with her son, Philip, and her husband, Andrew. Philip, her little puppet, immediately doesn’t fit in. They are right now at potluck, where the food is five-cheese macaroni and cheese, asparagus fresh from the Farmer’s Market. Stews of all sorts. Philip is standing before a family’s pet dog (a rescue; a mixed breed). He has pulled down his pants. “I have a tail, too,” he says, his button penis on delighted display.
“Philip,” Elizabeth says, but she can’t keep the laughter from her voice.
Andrew is very disappointed in her, he says, when they’re back home. He’s the academic. They’re living here because of him. She should try harder, he says. She could at least give it a chance. He thinks the people here are quite nice, actually.
Elizabeth’s title, while they are here, is “spouse.”
It’s not as though she does nothing with her time, though. She plays the piano. She reads books. She has Philip.
“Come on,” she says. “It was funny.”
“It was embarrassing,” he says. “Those people are my colleagues.”
“Not all of them are your colleagues,” Elizabeth says. “Some of them are spouses.”
“Terrific,” Andrew says. “That’s just great. Okay?”
“You used to think I was funny,” she says. “You used to think Philip was funny.”
“Well, that’s not baiting me at all.”
He thinks he’s being baited? Now Elizabeth can’t help herself.
“I guess it really is true,” she says, savoring the cliché she’s about to lob, “that a leopard never changes—”
“His diaper,” Philip finishes.
And Andrew does laugh. They both laugh. They’re so ridiculous. What are they doing, fighting? They’re on an adventure, the three of them. They’re in the middle of nowhere; isn’t it romantic.
Elizabeth joins a sewing class. There are only two other people in the class, both women, but the teacher is a man. He has long, elegant hands. Piano hands. Elizabeth asks him if he also knows how to play.
“To play?” he says.
“No, an instrument.” Elizabeth plays an imaginary piano and is so embarrassed. She hates it when she acts like this.
“Does a needle count as an instrument?” he says. His smile curls up like an old-fashioned mustache.
She just, she says. She didn’t mean.
He puts his hand on her shoulder, and it stays there, heavy as cement. She doesn’t need to be so worried, he says.
It’s just sewing, he says.
Their task, this first day, is to get to know each other. They sit in a tiny, awkward half-circle. The woman to Elizabeth’s right is a nun; the woman to her left has brought her infant in a snuggly. The baby is a little girl, with paper eyelids and small lips that make a heart. The nun’s name is Sister Josephine. The woman with the baby is Margret. The baby is Violet.
“How old?” Elizabeth asks.
“Sixty-seven, if I am a day,” says Sister Josephine. Her hair is like albino cotton candy, wispy white.
“Fourteen weeks,” Margret says.
Sister Josephine chuckles. “Now, we don’t see a whole lot of babies over at the nunnery.”
“I don’t imagine,” Margret says. Her nose is elegantly pinched. It’s possible she’s had some work done.
“I’m out of the nunnery,” Sister Josephine says. “There comes a day in every nun’s life.”
“Does your husband work for the university?” Margret says, smiling at Elizabeth as though she knows her.
“Oh, I don’t have a husband,”says Elizabeth, and immediately, it might be true. She’s a pioneer of a woman, here in this college town, anonymous and alone. “It’s just me.”
“You work for the university,” Margret says. She is smiling and nodding.
“I work in maintenance,” Elizabeth says. “Janitorial division,” she says.
She knows she’s being awful. Sometimes she can help it, but sometimes she just can’t.
“Well, isn’t that something,” says Sister Josephine.
Margret’s smile is only vaguely ugly. “There’s something for everyone,” she says. “Isn’t that right? Isn’t it, Violet? Oh yes, isn’t it?”
It’s almost time for Andrew to come home, and Elizabeth and Philip are playing with Play Dough.
“Is there a right way to play Play Dough?” Philip asks.
He is the most fastidious of anyone she knows. He likes for things to go correctly, and at all costs avoids a mess. So: jelly just in the center of his bread, far from his fingertips. Craft projects that didn’t require glue. A carefully thought out request for a birthday cake absent of frosting.
He might have yet-undiagnosed OCD.
Elizabeth says, nope, there’s not a right way. He nods. He’s waiting for her. She rolls the Play Dough into a snail.
“Do you know snails are slugs inside shells?”
“Stop talking,” he says.
He isn’t afraid of the things she is. It never crosses his mind to be polite.
He takes the Play Dough delicately between his fingers. “This is a truck,” he informs her.
She wants to inhale him. He’s her truest soul mate. “Do you remember being born?”
He wipes his hands on her lap.
“You had the longest fingers,” she says. “And the softest skin. Your eyes were blue as blue.”
“My hair was black as black,” he whispers. His shoulders meet his ears. She can remember what it was like to feel this way: as if happiness could kill you.
“Right as right,” she says.
He nods.
“But where do babies come out from?” he asks.
It’s this kind of question that will get him kicked out of nursery school.
Elizabeth knows she isn’t doing a very good job. He’s not your friend, Andrew often tells her.
It can be so hard to remember. She does think of him as her buddy, her sidekick. Her waltzing partner. She’s taught him to bow and hold out his hand. May I have this dance? she’s taught him to ask. And then she swoops him up, takes his hand in hers, and dips him, and swirls. On her hip, they’re almost the same height.
Andrew’s key announces itself in the doorknob. “Rattle, rattle,” Elizabeth tells Philip, her eyebrows all the way up. Philip zooms to the door, her little racecar, her gentle monster.
Andrew picks up Philip. “Mister Pip,” he says.
Philip is resplendent. His face, up until now, has been a moon, but now it’s slipped over with sun. Andrew sets Philip down. Philip wraps himself around Andrew’s legs.
Andrew pets Philip’s head and slumps into a chair, but with vigor. “My students don’t know their asses from their faces,” says Andrew. Elizabeth can see this is a line he’s held onto all day, like a hamster with cheeks full of hoarded food.
“Surely that’s not true,” Elizabeth says. “That would be a hard thing to mix up.”
She’s not sure how it’s happened that she’s unwilling to give him anything. It’s not his fault that he’s achieved this moderate success, and she has not. She needs to remember: She reads. She plays the piano. She has Philip. And now sewing.
“That’s funny, actually,” she says. “I didn’t get it at first.”
&
nbsp; “One kid said he was taking my class because he wanted to take as many psychology classes as he could. Can you imagine? So I said, ‘Well, this is Sociology.’ And get this, he said, ‘That’s what I meant. Same difference.’ Same difference!” Andrew shakes his head, smiling.
“Stop talking,” Philip says, and they do.
Philip now spends his weekends with Andrew. It’s just a trial separation, just a some breathing room for them both. She sends Philip with a tiny knapsack on his back, a puff of parachute. In the knapsack is all his stuff: furry pajamas, but not the kinds with feet, his miniature toothbrush and the toothpaste that is vanilla-flavored (he prefers vanilla to chocolate). The spare diaper for sleeping—only for sleeping now. When she hugs him, his body is warm, as though fresh from the dryer.
“I’m going to miss you,” she says. “Are you going to miss me?”
He spreads his arms into airplane wings. “This much,” he says. But there’s already a look in his eyes, as though he’s otherwise engaged.
Elizabeth misses him too much. So she invites her youngest sister for a visit. Sophie is also Elizabeth’s baby. There are five years between them. Sophie was only eight when their mother died. And she was so cute. She’s still so cute.
“I’m thinking about getting an abortion,” Sophie says, when she arrives.
Elizabeth didn’t know Sophie was pregnant.
Elizabeth takes Sophie’s suitcase. Sophie’s hair is long now, but when she was little, she had a boy’s haircut. Her hair was a feathery cap Elizabeth would ruffle. I’m ruffling your feathers, she used to say.
“Oh, don’t have an abortion,” Elizabeth says. “That wouldn’t be any fun.”
She used to sit Sophie down in a rolling chair and pretend it was a baby carriage.
“Did you tell Lucille?” Elizabeth asks.
Lucille is their middle sister. Elizabeth has never had patience for her. She was too skinny as a child; her skin was too oily. She sat alone in the lunchroom at school and Elizabeth hated it that Lucille had to be her sister.
“Lucille thinks it’s a good idea,” Sophie says. “She had one.”
“She did not,” Elizabeth says. “She’s lying if she told you that.”
“You don’t know everything,” Sophie says.
Elizabeth holds up the suitcase and shakes it, as though it’s a present, tightly, mysteriously wrapped. “You have almost nothing in here,” she says. “We’ll have to take you shopping.”
Elizabeth gets some details. Sophie says the impregnator (the father?) is her boyfriend. She likes him okay. She doesn’t think she wants to be a mother. Elizabeth can’t bear the idea of a little Sophie vacuumed out of her sister.
“I’d raise the baby,” Elizabeth says. “You’d have nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Sophie says.
But Elizabeth does. She really does.
“If it’s a girl, we could name her after Mommy.”
“You could,” Sophie says. “It would be yours.”
Their father calls with the real explanation. The baby isn’t Sophie’s at all. She’s carrying it for some couple. She’s what they call a surrogate. Their father asks if Elizabeth would please take care of Sophie, who’s been having such a hard time of it.
A stolen child. It’s exactly Elizabeth’s worst fear, come to find her.
Elizabeth tells her father she’ll take care of Sophie, of course.
“I guess we won’t be naming the baby after Mommy, after all,” she says to Sophie, who looks away.
“Lucille did get an abortion,” Sophie says. “She told me.”
“We need to get you some vitamins,” Elizabeth says. “And some doctor’s appointments.”
Sophie nods, and it’s so close to Philip’s little nod. Like she’s hearing and not hearing.
“Gosh, you’re cute,” Elizabeth says.
Sophie peels off a cuticle.
“I bet you’re wondering about Andrew,” Elizabeth says. “We’re just taking some time. It’s not something to worry about. Philip is only there every other weekend. Otherwise, he’s here.”
“Okay,” Sophie says. She looks up at the ceiling.
There’s nothing for Elizabeth to do but return to her sewing class. She invites Sophie, but Sophie says no thanks. She’ll just stay home, she tells Elizabeth. She’ll eat pickles and ice cream, like she’s supposed to.
Elizabeth laughs. It’s a bad joke—Elizabeth thinks it’s a joke, anyway—but it’s a good sign. She wants to encourage Sophie. Cute little Sophie.
Elizabeth decides she’ll sew the baby that’s not actually Sophie’s baby a blanket. She’ll make it yellow, to keep things neutral.
They go around the room and name their projects. “A baby blanket,” Elizabeth says.
“How lovely,” says Margaret. Baby Violet is asleep in her sling. Elizabeth doesn’t understand how Margaret has managed to have some a well-behaved infant. She wonders if there’s cough syrup involved.
“I wish the blanket were for me, but I’m barren,” Elizabeth says.
She likes this version of herself: a barren, non-married janitor. A woman in possession of a life that’s objectively shit from any angle. Classist and sexist—that’s what the group of idiots she met at the potluck would say about that thought. Who’s to say whose life is shit, they’d say. But they wouldn’t say “shit.” They’d say, probably, “rife with challenges.” Well, let them just lock her up.
Margaret puts her hand to her throat. “You mean you struggle with fertility,” she says. “We don’t use the word ‘barren’ anymore.”
Elizabeth would love to ask who this “we” is, but she knows, of course.
“They took my uterus out,” Elizabeth says. “The whole kit and caboodle.”
“You’re a cancer survivor,” Margaret says.
“Oh, it was preemptive,” says Elizabeth. “A just-in-case sort of thing.”
Margaret nods, hand still held to her throat. “You have a family history.”
Elizabeth isn’t sure what’s just happened, how it is she’s wound up telling this particular truth. “It was a more of a eugenics thing,” she says, in love with the rash of horror that’s seized Margaret’s face.
“Now, we don’t see a whole lot of babies in the nunnery,” says Sister Josephine.
So it turns out she’s definitely insane. It’s such a relief to know exactly who people are.
“I take it you’re telling a joke?” Margaret says to Elizabeth. “It’s very cruel.”
Elizabeth nods. “Very,” she says.
And then the teacher comes around with his beautiful piano hands, asking does anyone need help.
The sewing teacher reminds Elizabeth of her final piano teacher before her mother’s death. Charles. The memory comes up suddenly and without warning, like a burp that turns out to be vomit to be swallowed: Elizabeth is twelve, meeting Bernadette Peters backstage after Annie Get Your Gun. Elizabeth’s mother went to conservatory with the pianist in the orchestra, and the pianist, after hugging Elizabeth’s mother, brings them right to Bernadette’s dressing room. He knocks and calls, “Whenever you’re ready, Bernadette.” And then there she is: tiny, porcelain-skinned, with hair that looks like it’s on fire. She smiles with her lips together, but generously.
She holds out her hand for Elizabeth to shake, and Elizabeth just about collapses. She does not know if she has ever been this happy, this capable of expansion. She feels herself become large. Bernadette’s hand in hers is cool and soft, powdery. She must use a special soap.
Elizabeth’s mother tells Bernadette and the pianist that today is Elizabeth’s birthday. She puts a hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Twelve today,” she says.
The pianist says, “My goodness, time passes.” He says to Bernadette, “The two of us came up together.”
“Where do you play?” Bernadette asks Elizabeth’s mother.
Elizabeth isn’t going to look at her mother. She tells herself, Don’t. Don�
�t. She doesn’t want to see her mother smile the way she does when people ask her about her music. It looks like just a regular smile, but there’s something in it, or near it, that’s mean. She feels her mother’s hand on her shoulder.
“Right now I’m doing the mom thing,” her mother says.
“Hardest job in the world,” says the pianist.
“Elizabeth plays the piano,” her mother says. Her hand is still on Elizabeth’s shoulder.
Elizabeth does play the piano. Every night, she practices three hours. Her sisters run wild around the house while she does, laughing and yelling and not doing their homework. They watch an incredible amount of TV. They try to distract her, but Elizabeth doesn’t let herself get distracted. She just plays.
Bernadette says, “I hope you enjoyed the performance,” in a way that means goodbye, and smiles, her lips in a bow. She smiles at everyone, but Elizabeth knows Bernadette’s smile is for her. Bernadette steps back into her dressing room, her movements soundless and so, so perfect.
Elizabeth can still smell her perfume even now that she’s gone.
The pianist asks Elizabeth’s mother if he can take her out to dinner—take them, Elizabeth too, of course—out to dinner. Elizabeth’s mother says it can’t hurt. She laughs in a way Elizabeth doesn’t recognize. It makes Elizabeth feel embarrassed, and guilty for being embarrassed. She kind of wishes Lucille were there. Lucille would know what to say. She’d say, Mommy, what the heck? Take us home already. But Elizabeth is her mother’s good daughter. She isn’t allowed to say the things Lucille is allowed to say. Lucille is the bad daughter. (Sophie, cute little Sophie, doesn’t have to worry about being good or bad. She’s just a baby. Even though she’s seven.)
The pianist—call him Charles, he tells Elizabeth—takes them out to a fancy Italian restaurant where small, round candles live in glass cups, emitting satisfying heat when Elizabeth touches the glass, just quickly, with her pinky. Elizabeth orders fettuccine Alfredo, which comes dotted with Parmesan cheese and parsley. Ordinarily, Elizabeth will not eat anything with green on it, but tonight she feels sophisticated. She doesn’t complain. She wraps the fettuccine around her silver fork.