by Andre Dubus
The next day her parents and Michaelis took her to the airport.
She met Holly at the terminal and they flew to Boston. She was eighteen years old.
She lived with Holly in a second-floor apartment Holly found on Beacon Street. It was large, and its wide, tall windows overlooked the old, shaded street. They put a red carpet in the living room and red curtains at the windows. Holly’s boyfriend, who went to school in Rhode Island, built them a bar in one corner, at the carpet’s edge. Holly was a year older than Miranda, this was her second year at Boston University, and the boys who came to the apartment were boys she had known last year. There were also some new ones, and soon Holly was making love with one of them. His name was Brian. When he came to the apartment Miranda watched him and listened to him, but she could neither like him nor dislike him, because she could not understand who he was. He was a student and for him the university was a stalled escalator: he leaned against its handrails, he looked about him and talked and gestured with his hands, his pale face laughed and he stroked his beard, and his hair tossed at his neck. But there was no motion about him.
When he spent the night, Holly unfolded the day bed in the living room and Miranda had the bedroom to herself. She lay on her twin bed at the window and listened to rock music from an all-night FM station; still there were times when, over the music, she could hear Holly moaning in the next room. The sounds and her images always excited her, but sometimes they made her sad too; for on most weekends Tom drove up from Providence and on Friday and Saturday nights Miranda fell asleep after the same sounds had hushed. Brian knew about Tom and seemed as indifferent to his weekend horns as he was to an incomplete in a course or the theft of his bicycle, which he left on the sidewalk outside a Cambridge bar one Sunday afternoon.
Tom knew nothing about Holly’s week nights. The lottery had spared him, so he was a graduate student in history and, though he tried not to, at least once each visit he spoke of the diminishing number of teaching jobs. He was robust and shyly candid and Miranda liked him very much. She liked Holly very much too and she did not want to feel disapproval, but there it was in her heart when she heard the week night sounds and then the weekend sounds, and when she looked at Tom’s red face and thick brown moustache and thinning hair. One night in late September Miranda and Holly went to a movie and when they came home they sat at the bar in the living room and drank a glass of wine. After a second glass Miranda said Tom had built a nice bar. Then she asked if he was coming this weekend. Holly said he was.
‘I’d feel divided,’ Miranda said, and she looked at Holly’s long blonde hair and at the brown, yellow-tinted eyes that watched her like a wise and preying cat.
Then it was early October and she was afraid. At first it was only for moments which struck her at whim: sometimes in class or as she walked home on cool afternoons she remembered and was afraid. But she did not really believe, so she was only afraid when memory caught her off guard, before she could reassure herself that no one was that unlucky. Another week went by and she told Holly she was late.
‘You can’t be,’ Holly said.
‘No. No, it must be something else.’
‘What would you do?’
She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything except that now she was afraid most of the time. Always she was waiting. Whether she was in class or talking to Holly or some other friend, even while she slept and dreamed, she was waiting for that flow of blood that would empty her womb whether it held a child or not. Although she did not think of womb, of child, of miscarriage. She hoped only for blood.
Then October was running out and she knew her luck was too. Late Halloween afternoon she went to the office of a young gynecologist who had the hands of a woman, a plump face and thin, pouting lips. He kept looking at his wrist watch. He asked if she planned to keep the child and when she told him yes he said that if she were still in Boston a month from now to come see him. As she was leaving, the receptionist asked her for twenty dollars. Miranda wrote a check, then went out to the street where dusk had descended and where groups of small witches, skeletons, devils, and ghosts in sheets moved past her as she stopped to light a cigarette; she followed in the wake of their voices. Holly was home. When Miranda told her she said: ‘Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus.’
‘I’m all right,’ Miranda said. She noticed that she sounded as if she were reciting something. ‘I’m all right. I’m not in trouble, I’m only having a baby. It’s too early to call Michaelis. It’s only three o’clock in California. He’ll still be at school. I’d like to rest a while then eat a nice meal.’
‘We only have hamburger. I’ll go out and get us some steaks.’
‘Here.’
‘No. It’s my treat.’
While Holly was gone, Miranda put on Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles and lay on the couch. The doorbell rang and she went downstairs and gave candy to the children. She and Holly had bought the candy yesterday: candy corn, jelly beans, bags of small Tootsie Rolls, orange slices, and chocolate kisses; and now, pouring candy into the children’s paper bags, smiling and praising costumes, she remembered how frightened she was yesterday in the store: looking at the cellophane bags of candy, she had felt she did not have the courage to grow a minute older and therefore would not. Now as she passed out the candy she felt numb, stationary, as though she were suspended out of time and could see each second as it passed, and each of them went on without her.
She went upstairs and lay on the couch and the doorbell rang again. The children in this group were costumed too, but older, twelve or thirteen, and one of the girls asked for a cigarette. Miranda told her to take candy or nothing. When she went upstairs she was very tired. She had been to three classes, and she had walked in the cold to the doctor’s and back. While the Beatles were singing she went to sleep. The doorbell rang but she didn’t answer; she went back into her deep sleep. When Holly came in talking, Miranda woke up, her heart fast with fright. Holly put on the Rolling Stones and broiled the steaks and they drank Burgundy. During dinner Brian called, saying he wanted to come over, but Holly told him to make it tomorrow.
At eight o’clock, when it was five in California, Miranda went to the bedroom and closed the door and sat on her bed. The phone was on the bedside table. She lowered her hand to the receiver but did not lift it. She gazed at her face in the reflecting window. She was still frozen out of time, and she was afraid that if Michaelis wasn’t home, if the phone rang and rang against the walls of his empty apartment, something would happen to her, something she could not control, she would go mad in Holly’s arms. Then she turned away from her face in the window and . looked at the numbers as she dialed; his phone rang only twice and then he answered and time had started again.
‘Happy Halloween,’ she said.
‘Trick or treat.’
‘Trick,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’ He was silent. She closed her eyes and squeezed the phone, as though her touch could travel too, as her voice did, and she saw the vast night between their two coasts, saw the telephone lines crossing the dark mountains and plains and mountains between them.
‘It’s about two months, is that right?’
‘It was September second.’
‘I know. Do you want to get married?’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do. If that’s what you’re thinking about.’
‘I’m not thinking about anything. I saw the doctor this afternoon and I haven’t thought about anything.’
‘Look: do you want to do it at Thanksgiving? That’ll give me time to arrange things, I have to find out about blood tests and stuff, and your folks’ll need some time—you want me to talk to them?’
‘No, I will.’
‘Okay, and then after Thanksgiving you can go back and finish the semester. At least you’ll have that done. I can be looking for another apartment. This is all right for me, maybe all right for two, but with a—’ He stopped.
‘Are you sure you want to?’
‘Of course I am. It just sounded strange, saying it.’
‘You didn’t say it.’
‘Oh. Anyway, we’ll need more room.’
‘I didn’t think he’d do that,’ Holly said. She was sitting on the living room carpet, drinking tea. Miranda could not sit down; she stood at the window over Beacon Street, she went to the bar for a cigarette, she moved back to the window. ‘I just didn’t think he would,’ Holly said.
‘You didn’t want him to.’
‘Are you really going to get married?’
‘I love him.’
‘He’s your first one.’
‘My first one. You mean the first one I’ve made love with.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s how you mean it.’
‘That’s how. And you’ve only done that once.’
‘That’s not what it means to me.’
‘How would you know? You’ve never had anybody else.’
‘But you have.’
‘What’s that mean.’
‘I guess it means look at yourself.’
‘All right. I’ll look at myself. I’ve never had to get married, and I’ve never had to get an abortion, and nobody owns me.’
‘I want to be owned.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. The way you are now, you have to lie.’
‘I don’t lie to Tom. He doesn’t ask.’
‘I don’t mean just that. I don’t know what I mean; it’s just all of it. I have to go outside for a minute. I have to walk outside.’
She put on her coat as she went down the gray-carpeted stairs. She walked to the corner and then up the dead-end street and climbed the steps of the walk that crossed Storrow Drive. As she climbed she held the iron railing, but it was cold and she had forgotten her gloves. She put her hands in her pockets. She stood on the walk and watched the cars coming and passing beneath her and listened to their tires on the wet street. To her right was the Charles River, wide and black and cold. On sunny days it was blue and in the fall she had watched sailboats on it. Beyond the river were the lights of Cambridge; she thought of the bars there and the warm students drinking beer and she wanted Michaelis with her now. She knew that: she wanted him. She had wanted him for a long time but she had told him no, had even gone many times to his apartment and still told him no, because all the time she was thinking. On that last night she wasn’t thinking, and she had not done any thinking since then: she had moved through September and October in the fearful certainty of love, and she still had that as she stood shivering above the street, looking out at the black river and the lights on the other side.
She phoned her parents at nine-fifteen, during their cocktail hour. Her mother talked on the phone in the breakfast room, and her father went to his den and used the phone there. He would be wearing a cardigan and drinking a martini. Her mother would be wearing a dress; nearly always she put on a dress at the end of the day. She would be sitting on the stool by the phone, facing the blackboard where Miranda and her two older brothers had read messages when they came home from school, and written their own. Once, when she was a little girl, she had come home and read: Pussycat, I’m playing golf. I’ll be home at four, in time to pay Maria. And she had written: Maria was not here. I feel sick and I am going to bed. Beyond her mother’s head, the sun would be setting over the bluff behind the house; part of the pool would be in the bluff’s shadow, the water close to the house still and sunlit blue.
The sun would be coming through the sliding glass doors that opened to the pool and the lawn, those glass doors that one morning when she was twelve she opened and, looking down, saw a small rattlesnake coiled sleeping in the shade on the flagstone inches from her bare feet. As she shut the doors and cried out for her father it raised its head and started to rattle. Her father came running bare-chested in pajama pants; then he went to his room and got a small automatic he kept in his drawer and shot the snake as it slithered across the stones. Sunlight would be coming through those doors now and into the breakfast room and shining on her mother in a bright dress.
‘Fly home tomorrow,’ her mother said.
‘Well, I’ll be home at Thanksgiving. Michaelis said he’d arrange it for then.’
‘We’d like to see you before that,’ her mother said.
‘And don’t worry,’ her father said. ‘You’re not the first good kids to get into a little trouble.’
That night she fell asleep listening to her father’s deep and soothing voice as it drew her back through October and September, by her long hair (but gently) dragging her into August and the house in Woodland Hills, the pepper trees hanging long over the sidewalks, on summer mornings coffee at the glass table beside the pool and at sixteen (with her father) a cigarette too, though not with her mother until she was seventeen; in the morning she woke to his voice and she heard it on the plane and could not read Time or Holiday or Antigone, and it was his voice she descended through in the night above Los Angeles, although it was Michaelis who waited for her, who embraced her. When they got home and she hugged her father she held him tightly and for a moment she had no volition and wanted none. Just before kissing her mother, Miranda looked at her eyes: they were green and they told her she had been foolish; then Miranda kissed her, held her, and in her own tightening arms she felt again her resolve.
They went to the breakfast room. Before they started talking, Miranda went outside and looked at the pool and lawn in the dark. Fog was settling; tops of trees touched the sky above the bluff. She went in and sat at one end of the table, facing her father and the glass doors behind him. They reflected the room. Her father’s neck and bald head were brown from playing golf, his thin moustache clipped, more gray than she had remembered, and there was more gray too (or more than she had seen, thinking of him in Boston) in the short brown hair at the sides of his head. He was drinking brandy. Or he had a snifter of brandy in front of him, but he mostly handled it; he picked it up and put it down; he ran his finger around the rim; he warmed it in his cupped hands but didn’t drink; with thumb and fingers he turned it on the table. He was smoking a very thin cigar, and now and then he cheated and inhaled. Her mother sat to his left, at the side of the table; she had pulled her chair close to his end of the table and turned it so she faced Miranda and Michaelis. Her hair had been growing darker for years and she had kept it blonde and long. Her skin was tough and tan, her face lined, weathered, and she wore bracelets that jangled. She was drinking brandy and listening, though she appeared not listening so much as hearing again lines she had played to for a hundred nights, and waiting for her cue. Miranda mostly watched her father, because he was talking, though sometimes she glanced at Michaelis; he was the one she wanted to watch, but she didn’t; for she didn’t want anyone, not even him, to see how much she was appealing to him. He sat to her left, his chair was pulled toward her so that he faced her parents, and when she looked at him she saw his quiet profile, his dark curly hair, his large hand holding the can of Coors, and his right shoulder, which was turned slightly away from her. She wanted to see his eyes but she did not really need to; for in the way he occupied space, quiet, attentive, nodding, his arms that were so often spread and in motion now close to his chest, she saw and felt what she had seen at the airport: above his jocular mouth the eyes had told her he had not been living well with his fear.
‘—so it’s not Mother and me that counts. It’s you two. We’ve got to think about what’s best for you two.’
‘And the baby,’ Miranda said.
‘Come on, sweetheart. That’s not a baby. It’s just something you’re piping blood into.’
‘It’s alive; that’s why you want me to kill it.’
‘Sweetheart—’
‘Do you really want it?’ her mother said.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you. You mean you’re happy about it? You’re glad you’re pregnant?’
‘I can do it.’
‘You can have a baby, sure,’ her father said
. ‘But what about Michaelis? Do you know how much studying there is in law school?’
‘I can work,’ she said.
‘I thought you were having a baby,’ her mother said.
‘I can work.’
‘And hire a Mexican woman to take care of your child.’
‘I can work!’
‘You’re being foolish.’
Her father touched her mother’s arm.
‘Wait, honey. Listen, sweetheart, I know you can work. That’s not the point. The point is, why suffer? Jesus, sweetheart, you’re eighteen years old. You’ve never had to live out there. The hospital and those Goddamn doctors will own you. And you’ve got to eat once in a while. Michaelis, have another beer.’
Michaelis got up and as he moved behind Miranda’s chair she held up her wine glass and he took it. When he came back with his beer and her glass of wine he said: ‘I can do it.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ her mother said. ‘Whether you can or not. Maybe it won’t be good for Miranda. What are you going to be, pussycat—a dumb little housewife? Your husband will be out in the world, he’ll be growing, and all you’ll know is diapers and Gerbers. You’ve got to finish college—’ It was so far away now: blackboards, large uncurtained windows looking out at nothing, at other walls, other windows; talking, note-taking; talking, talking, talking…She looked at Michaelis; he was watching her mother, listening. ‘—You can’t make marriage the be-all and end-all. Because if you do it won’t work. Listen: from the looks of things we’ve got one of the few solid marriages around. But it took work, pussycat. Work.’ Her eyes gleamed with the victory of that work, the necessity for it. ‘And we were older. I was twenty-six, I’d been to school, I’d worked; you see the difference it makes? After all these years with this guy—and believe me some of them have been like standing in the rain—now that I’m getting old and going blind from charcoal smoke at least I know I didn’t give anything up to get married. Except my independence. But I was fed up with that. And all right: I’ll tell you something else too. I’d had other relationships. With men. That helped too. There—’ she lightly smacked the table ‘—that’s my confession for the night.’