by Rich Horton
“For someone so clever, you can be an unbelievably stupid kid,” he said abruptly.
That shot told. “I haven’t been a kid in a while, John.”
“You’re a child, Charlene. Don’t fool yourself. You don’t know anything.”
So she stopped touching him. That was the year she felt very tired.
The spell that year was “make.” If she’d still been riding high on last year’s successes, it would have killed her; as it was she spent her time mechanically breathing life back into dead matches, watching the blackened wood burst into flame that spluttered out as quickly as it flared. Cherry spent long nights trying to coax water to ice and ice to water again with red raw hands. “Make” was a double-edged sword. Creating things was easy enough, but sustaining them was like eating soup with a fork, and after the most half-assed attempt she’d be so hungry that she’d chew her hair and her nails trying to make the feeling go away. Sometimes she thought about eating Styrofoam peanuts just to fill up the space in her gut.
Mr. Hollis withdrew from her into an armoured shell, emerging only sporadically like he was guilty for the absence. Cherry was good at absences, the best, and it hardly hurt unless you thought about it suddenly. He sat across the kitchen table with a crossword, a great wall of silence spanning between master and apprentice as she tried to make a bud unfurl on his spider plant. Sometimes he’d stand by the window and make tiny incisions in the air with his fingers, and then Jen would suddenly show up and she’d be kicked out and flipping the bird at his closed door. She was pretty surprised when that summer came and she got dragged off to the beach as per usual; she almost thought he’d cancel summer due to lack of goddamned interest.
There was no comment on her bikini that long, hot July. She kicked around in the tidal pools trying to make starfishes grow back their legs, slathered with sunscreen and visceral disappointment. John spent his time under the umbrella with the newspaper, and she spent her time talking to dusty blond surfer boys with loud-patterned board shorts.
Seagulls cawed. He was fiddling with his sunglasses, saying nothing. The crow’s feet were tracking deeper indents at his eyes and mouth than they had when she’d first met him; back then she’d never noticed his age, only that he was old. Now he just looked young with premature crow’s feet. “You need some Botox,” she added, and unnecessarily reached out her hand to touch his cheek.
John flinched, then pretended he hadn’t. “God only knows, Cherry,” he said, with a little bit of the old humour. “Sometimes I feel there’s nothing left to teach you. Maybe it’s time to move on.”
That made her a little bit crazy, and with hunger it made her frantic. Matches, spider plants and ice cubes lost all appeal, June lost its sunshine. She threw herself down on her bed and cradled her head like her thoughts would pop off the top of her skull. Fuelled by his retreat and his distance, the specter of that idea haunted her like Casper the Friendly Ghost on meth.
When she turned up on his doorstep at 2 AM he didn’t look surprised, just tired. “You can’t send me away any more,” she said. “You see, I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
His apartment at night was full of unfamiliar shapes, the fan wafting stale air around the room and the carpet sticky beneath her feet. Without saying a word he lead her to his hall closet, putting her hand on the doorknob before sitting down at the kitchen table in his sweatpants and t-shirt. John didn’t look at her, just rubbed his hands together like restless birds.
“I was waiting for you to grow up,” he said.
After she flicked the light bulb on, the closet was full of jackets and beach umbrellas, stacks of books and an old vacuum cleaner. Half-hidden beneath a parka was a freshly dead stranger in jogging shoes whose thighs had been carefully sectioned and long strips of meat taken away. There was blood underfoot. At the familiar smell of old putrefaction overlaying new putrefaction she gagged until tears came into her eyes; it filled her nostrils. It filled her mouth.
“Magicians eat,” he said, looking at her with eyes the colour of ghosts. “We eat more and more and more, Cherry Murphy, of anything we can get our hands on.” A careless shrug. “Just look at me. I ate your childhood.”
The doorframe scored her back as she dropped to her haunches, hugging her knees tightly to her chest. Every so often she’d involuntarily gag again, rocking back and forth until John came and carried her away. She gagged into his chest and struggled when he put her in his lap, fisting her hands in his t-shirt, wadding it up into her lips so that she wouldn’t scream. His hand threaded hard through her hair. Saliva filled up her mouth and overflowed in trickles down his front.
She was crying so hard she couldn’t say a word. His fingers finally tugged his shirtfront away from her teeth as she drew more and more down her gullet. On her shoulders his thumbs dug deep into her collarbones, and now that he was looking at her his eyes were sunken and gleaming like the hearts of white stars. Every line in his face was deep and hard and old.
“It was never goat, was it?”
“Sweetheart, I couldn’t kill a goat,” said Mr. Hollis. “They’re adorable.”
This close up he smelled of acrid sweat and Listerine and her spittle, and her master magician had his arm around her to tether her down. He’d killed someone. He’d stashed them in his closet. He’d done it before. With an awful, dreadful surety, he slowly pressed her head into the table.
“Ball’s in your court,” said John.
Her stomach growled.
“I want some teriyaki sauce and a fork,” said Cherry.
Twenty-Two and You
Michael Blumlein
She didn’t want the test. She had vowed not to get it done. What she wanted was a family; she and Everett both. She would never have married a man who didn’t want kids.
Like her, he fancied a brood. One, if one was all they could have, but two would be better. Three would be better still.
Four? he had asked in one of their giddier moments. How would you feel about four?
Four, she had said, would do nicely.
Five?
She had smiled at the thought.
More? he had asked, those killer eyes of his widening slightly.
I couldn’t imagine more than five, she had said, meaning of course that she could.
As for the test, there’d be time enough later, after the children were born. And after she and Everett had been married a few more years.
Not that she had any doubts about their marriage. Everett loved her deeply, and she loved him. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, this love, like breathing. In another way it was a constant surprise to her, like opening an unexpected and wonderful gift. She felt it between them many times a day. Actually, she felt it pretty much whenever she thought about it. It was a living connection, and it streamed.
So many of her friends had to work at keeping their marriages running smoothly. Hers ran smoothly by default, and a large part of this, she felt, was due to Everett.
It was like her mother had said on the day before the wedding, when she’d pulled Ellen away from the last-minute preparations and taken her for a final prenuptial mother-daughter walk.
“Darling,” she’d said. “I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye. You don’t always approve of how I handle things. We’ve had our differences.”
Ellen had started to reply. Wasn’t it the reverse, her mother who didn’t approve? And did they have to talk about this now?
“Please. Let me finish. It’s not my business to judge you. It’s my business to love you, and I do. I think you’ve made a spectacular choice. I wish you every happiness. Not that you need anyone’s wish: it’s there for you, I see it ahead for many years.”
Ellen felt the same, but she was curious. “Why do you say that? How do you know?”
“It’s written all over your face. And all over his. It’s in the air whenever you’re together.”
Ellen had blushed. This was the mother she loved.
“I’m so happy, Mo
m. I feel so lucky.”
“I’m happy, too. Luck is a wonderful thing. But it’s not all luck, sweetheart. You had something to do with it. You picked a good one.”
A good one. Yes. She had. It was true. Everett was a good man, and she knew he would not leave her for anything. Not for love or for money, and not if she had her breasts removed.
He did love her breasts . . . he was a man, after all. He loved the shape of her body, and her breasts were a part of that shape. He loved to touch them, hold them in his hands, press his face against them, smother them with kisses.
Sometimes she felt self-conscious about them . . . she was a woman, after all, and had her moments of wondering if they were too big or too small, if the circles around the nipples were too dark, if the nipples themselves looked right. But on the whole she liked her breasts, too. She liked her body, and she was happy that Everett liked it, and she loved the sensation of her nipples being caressed and kissed and the sharp line of pleasure this sent from breast to womb.
That said, in no way did their relationship depend on them. If her breasts were gone, she would adjust, and Everett would, too. In sickness and in health, he had vowed, and he was a man who took his vows seriously.
The ovaries and uterus, on the other hand . . . a slightly bigger deal. Everett would say the same thing. Do it. Have them removed. He would not hesitate. In the future no word of regret would ever cross his lips. He would hide his disappointment, wall it off, from her and perhaps from himself as well. Your life is more important, he would say, than our having kids. And he’d mean it. Of course he would.
But for her, not so simple. Not simple at all. She would always know what she had failed to produce. There would be a hole in her life, and this would be a source of immeasurable sorrow. There would be a shadow over their marriage, an absence that she could not begin to think of how to fill.
Having kids was etched so deeply in her. It had been there, inside, for as long as she could remember, inseparable from who she was. Womanhood meant many things, and one of them was motherhood. This seemed only natural. Most of her friends, both married and unmarried, felt the same. Getting pregnant, giving birth, raising a family: let the wild rumpus begin! It was nature’s gift and plan.
You could live without breasts. But without kids? Without ovaries and a uterus? This felt unnecessarily cruel, and she would not do it. She could not. The ovaries and uterus were hers and would stay. She would not part with them, and furthermore, she would not put herself in a position where she would have to consider parting with them. In other words, she would not do the test to see if she had that awful gene, the one her grandmother and her mother had. That one, or any of the others that interacted with it, the so-called constellation that put her at such grave risk. For if she had it, she wouldn’t be able to ignore it. She wouldn’t be allowed to. Everett wouldn’t let her. Her mother wouldn’t let her. The two of them would keep at her to do something about it, in all the ways that loved ones exerted their love.
She preferred to remain ignorant for the time being.
Among her friends, nearly all of whom had been fully genotyped, this bordered on the heretical. You got a wax, a pedicure, you kept in shape, you kept in touch, you had your genome done. These were not the days of being uninformed. They were the days of knowing absolutely everything you could: about yourself, your friends, your friends’ friends, the world around you. Refuse data? Deny it either going out or coming in? Keep your own counsel? You might as well pack your bags and go live in a cave.
True, your genome was yours in a sense—a certain narrow, private, misanthropic, self-centered sense—but in a larger, fuller, more generous sense—a global sense, if you will—it was everyone’s. Your genome was part of the great world-wide human pool, and in this sense was public domain. Friends deserved to know who they were friends with. They deserved to know what their friends were made of—what, building-block-wise, they had inside, what this might lead to, and what their pedigree was. You might discover you shared a friend’s single nucleotide polymorphism, her SNP, and how cool would that be! You might even be related. Maybe your ancestors hunted together on the steppes of Mongolia. Maybe they shared a yurt and snuggled under the very same reindeer hide.
This was information that people who cared about people should know.
Ellen heard from more friends than she knew she had, sharing their experiences and concerns, and urging her to get profiled. She received links to one site after another, until she cried, Enough! Give it a rest. But the sites continued to find their way onto her screen. Forty and Six announced monthly specials. Our Chromosomes, Ourselves offered two-for-ones, and Genomania promised a free sequencing in exchange for the names of five or more friends who’d be interested in their services.
No thank you, she said to the screen, hitting delete. No thank you, unsubscribing. No thank you, no thank you, leave me alone. Go away. I don’t want your stupid test. I’ll do it AK, after kids.
Her mother pleaded with her not to wait that long. Getting pregnant could trigger the cancer. It was a big risk.
“You waited,” Ellen reminded her.
“I don’t have the full constellation. I just have the one bad gene. Besides, they didn’t have the test when I was your age. They didn’t have the technology.”
“Would you have done it if they did?”
“Absolutely.”
It was a bald-faced, if forgivable, lie.
“I don’t want to know something I’m not going to do anything about,” Ellen replied. “It’ll just worry me.”
“It doesn’t worry you now? It worries me.”
“Not as much as if I knew it for a fact. Then it would be like the cancer was already there. Already growing inside of me.”
What her mother wanted to say was, “Maybe it is.” But she couldn’t be that cold, not even in the name of love, so she held her tongue. It would be like placing a curse on her daughter, and she knew how it felt to be cursed. She’d had cancer in both breasts, and had had both breasts removed, along with the plumbing down below. It had been an awful experience, and that was before the complications. She had never fully recovered. The best thing she could say about the multiple surgeries was that she would never have to have them again.
Now the cancer was back, in one of her lungs.
She hadn’t yet told her daughter. How could she? What would she say? She hoped if she waited long enough, she wouldn’t have to say anything. She’d be hit by a car and die a quick and sudden death. Or die in her sleep, even better. Better still, the cancer would disappear. Her body would fight it off, or it would somehow self-destruct. A hari-kari, suicidal cancer . . . it could happen. She’d read accounts. It could shrivel up like a pea and leave her in peace. Being a peace-loving woman, she spent a fair amount of time every day visualizing this outcome.
She also spoke to it at times, as she might to a disobedient child, or an alien, or an enemy. She tried to reason with it, negotiate, court its favor, compromise. So far it wasn’t listening. It continued to grow and divide. Her visualizations and conversations didn’t seem to be working. The drugs weren’t working either. At a certain point she felt she had no choice but to tell her daughter.
She did it over coffee at Ellen and Everett’s apartment. Everett was working in the back.
Ellen was stunned. She shook her head, as if it couldn’t be true.
When she recovered her voice, she got angry, as her mother had suspected she might. She didn’t like being kept in the dark, especially about something like this. She didn’t understand why her mother insisted on being so secretive.
But the anger didn’t last. Soon it was swept away by a river of tears. When Everett finally wandered out to say hello, the two of them were locked in a fierce embrace.
He was next to get the news. It was not a happy moment. The three of them talked for a while, then Mom drove herself home.
The apartment seemed to shrink in her absence. The air felt heavy. The walls pressed in. El
len had to get out, and she and Everett took a walk. The streets were crowded. The sun was warm. The city was alive all around. Ellen felt this life acutely, almost painfully, and when they got back home, she asked Everett to make love to her.
She tended to be a vocal lover. Restraint was not her m.o., not, as it were, in her genes. She loved to make noise, to moan and groan and even cry out. This time, as she reached her climax, the cry was different, harsher, as if something was being torn from her. Afterward, she continued to cry, and Everett held her, until at length she quieted.
Later, curled in the warmth of his arms, she announced that she’d decided to have the test done. She would get her genome sequenced, A to Z.
“I’m glad,” he said.
“Will you be glad when I have no breasts? When I can’t have kids? Because once I do this, and I find out I have those stupid genes, I’m not going to stop. I’m going to do what I have to. If that means letting them rip me apart, I will. I refuse to stick my head in the sand like my mother did.”
“They’re not going to rip you apart,” he said.
“They’ll take away some very precious items.”
“They won’t take you.”
“Are you ready for a life without kids?”
He hesitated for less than a second. Would it have mattered if he hadn’t? If he’d answered immediately?
“We’ll work it out,” he said.
Our dream will die, she thought. “I want you to know where I stand.”
Showing him how tough she could be when she made up her mind. Warning him. Was she also, he wondered, asking him to take issue with her? Fight her on this? Say no, don’t do it?
“Why do you say your mother stuck her head in the sand?” he asked. “She didn’t know she was at risk until she was first diagnosed.”
“She didn’t want to know. Her mother had cancer. And there was a test for it years ago. Not like we have now, but it was something. She just refused to have it done.”