by Julia Slavin
“You too.”
Driving home, Dan said, “I think young Mr. Heimlich has a crush on you.”
“He’s an expectant father.” I was trying hard to sound irritated by what Dan had said. “You love the whole world when you’re expecting.”
“Why couldn’t you have married somebody handsome, Jane?” Miranda asks. “Why couldn’t you have married somebody like him?” Miranda points to an actor on the sitcom we’re watching. Miranda doesn’t think she’s beautiful regardless of what I tell her. She blames me for marrying her father and fouling up the gene pool. I never considered myself beautiful. I was so clumsy and shy in high school. Miranda disagrees and studies my high school yearbook. “Why’d you go with that geek? You could have gone with the quarterback, or him, or him, or him, or him.” She points out boys to whom I was invisible. She picks men on the street I should have married. Also in cars, in stores, in movies. She once rented a movie starring Pierce Brosnan. “That’s who you should have married.” I told her Pierce Brosnan wasn’t available when I was looking for a husband. Besides, I fell in love with her father. Didn’t it ever occur to her she wouldn’t exist if I had married Pierce Brosnan? “But imagine how cute I’d be,” she said.
“What about him, Jane?” she asks. We’re watching a show about a handsome single dad whose wife left the family to join a cult. Miranda calls me Jane and makes a point of saying my name in every sentence as though she’s trying to beat the Mom out of herself. That way it’ll be second nature when her friends are over. Her lip’s been bothering her. She keeps turning the ring no matter how much I tell her to leave it alone. She puffs up her cheeks and blows the braid out of her eyes; then she sits back against the couch and tugs on the lip ring.
“I’m done, Jane,” Mary, our housekeeper, calls to me on her way out. “I still need to get under the fridge, but I can’t really with the pudding there. I did clean around the pudding.” Mary’s dying for information about the pudding. I’ve told her not to touch it, to wax around it. And that’s what she’s done. The wax has mixed with the pudding at the edges and formed a brown acrylic halo.
I imagined sleeping with Scott. He’d call and want to finish our discussion from after class. We’d meet at the mall across from Merrill Lynch so he could buy a wallpaper border for the baby’s room. Could I help him choose? With his wife on bed rest he was left with putting the baby’s room together by himself. We’d split a sundae, leaving a thin wall of frozen yogurt where our spoons would otherwise have to touch. Then we’d wind our way up the gradual incline of shops that snake around the mall in a spiral beehive toward the hotel on the top floor, against the traffic of skateboarders, who have found a marble heaven in the winding floors and ramps. Passing the paper store where Dan and I picked the birth announcements for each of our children, the sporting goods store where Phin got his lacrosse equipment, Miranda’s favorite record store, we’d float blissfully upward.…
At the next class we practiced CPR on dummy babies that lay waiting for us in their own open suitcases, wearing little red and white rompers, scoops for eyes, round holes for mouths, no nostrils. Dan picked his up. “Mama,” he made the dummy say, and stretched out its scrawny arms. Dan had become the class favorite, and everybody laughed at his ventriloquist act. When Scott arrived I felt myself flush and saw Dan smile ironically. Scott nodded at me as he rushed into class late but then paled when he saw his dummy at the front of the room. He lowered himself to his knees and looked into the case, then awkwardly tried to lift the dummy without disturbing its eternal sleep. Donna instructed the class to lay the babies across our desktops and tilt their heads back. Dan made his do the backstroke. Scott never stopped supporting the baby’s head.
On the final exam I did well. Dan did better; in fact, he looked like he’d been an emergency medical doctor all his life. He expertly compressed the dummy’s chest, gave slow, controlled mouth-to-mouth breaths, checked and rechecked for a pulse every minute. The class applauded enthusiastically at their most popular boy, and Dan saluted the pretty nursing student.
Scott did not do well. He forgot to ask a bystander to call 911. He forgot the number of chest compressions. He never checked for pulse. He left right after the written exam and did not come back for the segment on wounds and burns. Later, Dan and I went out for coffee to celebrate getting the highest scores. I felt rejuvenated with Dan, surprised I’d given someone else a second thought.
By now Scott’s had his baby, perhaps even another, and he and his wife are getting up to speed with the rest of us.
Someone has stamped out a cigarette in the pudding. I call Phin downstairs to see what he knows. “I didn’t put a cigarette in the pudding!” he shouts in my face, nearly scaring me to death.
“Maybe one of your friends or Sheryl—”
“None of my friends put a cigarette in the pudding!”
“All right, Phin,” I say softly. “It could have been the housekeeper.”
Miranda has appeared at the kitchen door. “I’m cleaning up the pudding.” She’s holding a bucket and a bundle of old cloth diapers that we now use as rags. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Because you’re embarrassed in front of your friends?” I ask.
“I’m cleaning it up.”
“Oh, no, you’re not, young lady.” I walk away. Miranda drops the bucket and rags and runs upstairs.
“I bet if Phin wanted to clean up the pudding you’d let him,” she shrieks from her room.
I take Phin to the doctor to find out why he’s “itching and burning in a place guys don’t like to itch and burn.” He has a flaming case of gonorrhea. Driving home he moves uncomfortably in his seat and pretends to be interested in every car we pass.
I take a deep breath. “Phin, do you know about condoms?” I ask my handsome son.
“Yes.”
“Do you use them?”
“Yes.”
“All the time, Phin?”
“All the time.”
“Okay.” I feel like I’m going to cry.
Instead of going home I drive to the nature center and pull into the parking lot.
“Remember we came here when you were little?” I ask Phin, and take a space next to a school bus. “Remember? We went sledding and I brought you here to warm up?”
“No.”
There’s a large group of excited kindergartners outside the building. A teacher and some volunteers are trying to organize them. “Okay, kids. Time to get with your buddies and hold hands,” the teacher yells. The kids form two squirmy lines held together by little hands. A volunteer wraps a ribbon around the group, ties a knot, and makes a handle for the teacher to pull.
“That should hold ’em,” the volunteer says.
Phin digs his hands deep in the pockets of a maroon-and-white letter jacket stolen from Sheryl’s high school as we walk across the lot. The jacket’s too big for him. His arms are lost in the leather sleeves.
I’m surprised the nature center hasn’t been better maintained or the exhibits updated. Some of the displays I recognize from when I brought Phin here as a three-year-old—mostly Plexiglas boxes with stuffed birds and animals or leaves that you’re likely to see in Rock Creek Park. Phin glances over at the park ranger, who’s giving a tour to the kindergarten class.
“This ugly orange fungus is called a stinkhorn,” the ranger says. The kindergartners laugh at the word. “It’s called a stinkhorn because of the unpleasant odor it emits.” The kindergartners are beside themselves with laughter.
“Look, Phin, the birds of Washington, D.C.” Phin comes over for a look at pigeons behind Plexiglas.
“Now, what’s interesting about the stinkhorn,” the ranger says, and Phin looks back over, “is how fast it grows. It’s completely developed in just a couple of hours.” The kids are perplexed by this information.
“Phin, look at all the different kinds of spider webs,” I say.
“Flies eat the spores on top,” the ranger says, pointing to a picture of the s
trange fungus, which looks like an orange rhinoceros horn. “And the spores stick to the flies.” The kids have their mouths hanging open, and so does Phin. He’s let the sleeves of the jacket fall down over his hands like flippers. “And flies spread the fungi all through the forest.” There’s total quiet for a moment; then a boy in the back of the line says “Stinkhorn,” breaking the spell. The class laughs and moves on to the Birds of Washington, D.C.
“Isn’t that interesting,” I say in front of a squirrel display. “I never knew the black squirrel was a color phase of the gray squirrel.”
“Yes, you did.” Phin is looking at the stuffed raccoon.
“No, I really didn’t.”
Phin slides his fingers over the raccoon’s box, enjoying the smoothness of the Plexiglas. “They had those same squirrels when we came here before. And you said the same thing then.”
I can’t sleep. My son has gonorrhea, Miranda loathes herself, and Anastasia is three and has barely begun talking. I go down to the kitchen for a mug of warm milk and see a little chocolate footprint in the middle of the pudding. The crust has broken through to the soft custard, still velvety after all these months. I follow a trail of fading chocolate feet to Anastasia’s bedroom and watch her sleep in her deathlike way, not moving, hardly breathing. Miranda used to sleep this way too. Once or twice I shook her awake to make sure she was alive.…
Someone calls “Mom!” and I wake up with a start. The voice is too old for Anastasia.
“Mom!” Miranda calls from her bedroom.
I jump up, tearing my gown on a protruding nail at the base of our platform bed, and cross the hall to Miranda’s room. Her lip is puffed up three sizes and curled over the ring completely. I touch it. It’s hard as cement and she’s obviously in terrible pain. “Mommy,” she says. I get her up and dressed. She lets me pull her camisole over her head and dress her in a pair of leggings, an oversized New York Knicks T-shirt, and her blue boat decks. I hold her hand and lead her out of her room.
“What’s going on here?” Dan looks out from the dark bedroom, squinting from the light in the hall.
“I’m taking Miranda to the emergency room.”
A resident who looks like he could use some sleep studies Miranda’s lip, trying to figure out what to do. I imagine they didn’t cover lip rings in med school. “Yep,” he says, “we’re definitely going to have to get that ring outa there.” Miranda starts to cry. I lean over her on the gurney and hug her shoulders. I tell her it’s going to be fine. I’ll hold her the entire time; there won’t be a scar. The resident injects her chin with a nerve block, and as soon as she loses feeling he goes to work with a tiny pair of wire clippers.
“It’s going really well.” I lie to Miranda and squeeze her hand. There’s a lot of blood and I feel like killing the resident.
“When was her last tetanus?” the resident asks, trying to snip the ring with the clippers.
“She had a booster two years ago February.”
The resident steps back and lets the nurse, a short man with ridiculously huge biceps, dab the blood off her chin.
“So, Miranda.” The resident tries to distract her. “You’re a Knicks fan?”
“No,” Miranda says, her eyes darting around the emergency room. “The shirt’s just my way of saying thank you to New York for sending Pat Riley to the Heat.”
The resident and nurse think this is great and laugh. The nurse pats her knee. I didn’t know Miranda knew anything about basketball.
“Aren’t you a Washington Bullets—excuse me, Wizards—fan?” I ask.
“Trade Webber for Mourning and I’ll be a Wizards fan,” she says. “And lose Bickerstaff. He’s as bad as Unseld.”
“Hold on,” the nurse says. “Wes Unseld is my man.”
“Great player, a coaching disaster,” Miranda says.
I don’t know what any of these people are talking about. There’s a loud snip, and I’m certain the resident’s cut right through her lip, there’s so much blood, but then he holds up the bloody ring in the tweezers. “Voilà.”
At home we find the whole family in bed. Dan and Anastasia are curled together and Phin is lying at the foot with the remote control, watching an old black-and-white movie. When he realizes we’re there he flips to a hockey game rebroadcast on ESPN. Miranda flops next to him and tries to grab the remote control, which he holds up over her head. Anastasia and Dan sleep through the racket. Phin reaches over to touch the little Band-Aid on Miranda’s lip and she slaps his hand. He tries again, slowly and softly this time, and she lets him press around her swollen bottom lip, proud of her wound. She knows she’s impressed him.
I hate to break up such a rare time, but it’s late so I shoo them off to their rooms. Anastasia and Dan are so nicely curled together, I let her stay the night.
In the morning, I cut a deal with Dan. If he’ll agree to chip the pudding off the linoleum with an ice pick, I’ll sweep the pieces. The pudding chips off easier than we imagined and I sweep it effortlessly into the dustpan. Dan goes a step beyond the agreement and Spic & Spans the area with the sponge mop until the floor sparkles. Then we stand in our kitchen and drink fresh coffee and admire the house we’ve put so much work into. Anastasia’s at ballet. Phin’s at soccer. Miranda’s gone for a walk with her friend. Everything is calm. It’s a beautiful morning in October: the leaves at peak, the air refreshing. Our kitchen floor is as clean and white as glacier ice on a bright arctic day.
“So,” Dan says.
“So,” I say, which is exactly what we said after our first date in college, when Dan walked me to the door of my basement apartment in Georgetown, battling back the wisteria that had overgrown the steps to my studio, slicing through the vines, our arms like machetes, to get to my bed. Only then it was clear he was coming in for the night. Now we have the whole glorious morning to ourselves and don’t quite know what to do.
Lives of the Invertebrates
I’d never seen one so big, dead or alive. I take clients to steak houses in Boston, Philly, San Francisco, and Dallas; the husbands get steak; the wives casually pick at the magnificent lobsters from Nova Scotia, their tremendous claws quiet above their heads on the platter like the gloved hands of a fallen champ. But even those are generally no more than three-pounders.
I was skimming my Barron’s, strolling down a corridor at Logan, not in any particular hurry to catch my shuttle home, when I saw him. A hastily written sign on a white paper plate with fluted edges, duct-taped to a Popsicle stick, read, MEET MAX! THE EIGHT-POUND LOBSTER! I wondered, as I moved over to the tank, how old a lobster would have to be to get that big. Forty maybe. My age.
He took up half the tank. A détente appeared to have been invoked, perhaps a respect for age and relative misfortune, from the one- and one-and-a-half-pounders, who stayed pressed over on the other side of the tank. A couple of the one-pounders were scrapping it out, their claws bound tight by thick blue bands. They took turns jabbing at each other with their neutered claws for nonexistent territory in their final act before clutching each other in the bottom of a steamer pot. Except for his antennae, which swayed with the waves created by the boxing one-pounders, Max barely moved. Occasionally he’d raise a massive claw, as though he were going to rise up out of his situation. But then he’d give up and let it float down to the steel bottom of the tank. I wondered if perhaps he was sick. More likely he was exhausted after his journey from Canada. Or maybe he just didn’t have the stuff for a fight anymore. His eyes were hard to locate amid his massive blue-mottled shell, and I know now that lobsters don’t really see, that they rely on vibration and feel with their antennae, but I swear he was looking at me.
“You’re not going to sell him,” I said to the guy behind the tank, with a name tag that read CARL.
“’Course we’re going to sell him.” Carl blew smoke out of his nostrils and surveyed a crowd of flight attendants rushing by, a school of navy blue fish, with their neat bags on little wheels, the fabric of their pants stretching tight
with each step.
“A lobster that big must be forty years old, maybe more,” I said. “It doesn’t seem right to end that way.”
“I dunno,” Carl said. “I don’t usually work over here. Hey, Deucah!” he called, to a maintenance man passing by.
The man came over. They hit fists and exchanged separate salvos of “No fuckin’ way” and “Ya fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” and “Get da fuck outa here.” I always wonder where airport workers come from. Do they live nearby? Airports are so far away from everything. It’s not like you can go out to lunch or forget a document at home and rush back. You’re stuck. But watching Carl suck his lips at everything that went by in a skirt and push smoke out of his unfriendly face like the back of a bus, it was probably better to keep him marooned.
I leaned against a cement pillar across the corridor and tried to read my paper. But I couldn’t stop looking over at Max. He looked so sad. I was startled by a hand on my arm. A short woman, twenty-five maybe, looked up at me. “You’re right about that lobster,” she said. “It’s inhumane. I’m a vegan myself.”
I nodded, then noticed her looking at my hand to see if I had a ring and clenched my jaw to keep from asking her if she wanted a cup of coffee, or for her phone number. I saw the satisfied smile of my therapist. “Getting involved with a woman at the airport. Perfect,” he’d say, tapping his fingers on the teak coffee table that my twelve years of therapy helped to finance. “She’ll fly off and you’ll never see her again.” The woman could tell by my polite smile, and the silent language that single people speak to one another, that we weren’t going anywhere. She said good luck and walked off with her Le Sportsac. Who knows? Maybe she was the one. Probably not.
I have a history of getting involved with women who dump me or cheat on me, the most non-dumping non-cheating women in the world. Sweet women that I somehow drive away, my therapist says. Women named Wendy and Mary and Virginia, loving, smart, nurturing women, marrying types. There was even a girl cruelly misnamed Faith who went to bed with her paralegal the night before our engagement party. She said I was suffocating her. Wendy called me an octopus. Mary said she couldn’t turn around without an arm around her, a hand on every inch of her exemplary little body, that I was sucking the life out of her.