by Grant Ginder
What else is there, she wonders. She’s feeling like a leaky faucet today—all these subtleties just spilling out—she supposes she could tell them all the details she typically excludes. The stuff about how, while she squatted on her bathroom’s cold ceramic floor, staring at her fifth positive pregnancy test, she felt an unsettling mix of panic and shame and triumph. Panic for reasons that were obvious; shame because she’d graduated magna cum laude and she’d grown up in St. Charles and she could already hear her father’s voice, should he ever find out; triumph when she considered her half sister. When she was nineteen, Eloise suddenly began suffering from agonizing cramps whenever she got her period. After three months of them, her mother insisted that she fly back from Yale to see her gynecologist. Ultrasounds were performed, and a cyst was found. There was more: evidently, the haywire cells had existed for longer than Eloise had felt the cramps, because they’d decimated her uterus. Her chances of ever having children, the doctors told her, were next to nothing.
And here Alice was, holding her knees in an empty bathtub, pregnant without even trying.
“How did your parents react?”
“To me getting pregnant without being married? They were happy.”
That’s at least mostly true, Alice thinks. Her father approached the news with his characteristic gruff pragmatism. He wanted to know when Alejandro was going to propose (“Not if, Alice. When”), and she did her best to convince him that his Victorian social norms had been long since uprooted, and that neither she nor Alejandro thought matrimony to be a prerequisite for parenthood. Her mother, meanwhile, was ecstatic. Donna had shouldered Eloise’s infertility as if she were somehow the cause of it, as if it were a deficiency in herself. Alice changed all that, untangling Donna from a bizarre maternal guilt. Donna started calling more; instead of every two weeks, she’d check in every two days. And for once, Eloise ceased to be the marquee subject of their conversations. With a baby growing inside her, Alice was spared the sting of hearing about her half sister’s latest promotion at the foundation, or the charming Englishman she’d just snagged, or the marathon she’d just run. She could talk about herself and have her mother listen without worrying that she was boring her.
Karen clears her throat, and Alice looks up. “And the…”
“The miscarriage. I know. I’m stalling,” Alice says. “I was at a meeting with two foreign distributors, and I realized that I hadn’t felt the baby kick at all that morning. And this struck me as strange because … God, she loved to kick. Afterward, I read a bunch of stuff online about how these mothers suddenly stopped feeling their baby’s heartbeat, but … I don’t know. I think it’s like how some people say they can distinguish between their child’s cries. Like how one wail means that she’s hungry, and another one means she’s tired. I think that’s all a load of bullshit. I mean, I can barely feel my own heartbeat, and that’s when I’ve got two fingers pressed up against my neck. How am I supposed to feel my unborn daughter’s?”
One of the women looks at the ground, and Alice wonders if she’s said something wrong. She continues. “I went to the doctor once the meeting ended, which now, I’ll admit, seems a little … I don’t know. Seems a little … like I skewed my priorities or something. Like I should have gone straight there when I felt something strange, or even when I suspected that I felt something strange, and if I’d done that—if I’d acted on that instinct—she would have lived.”
“But—”
“Yes, I know what you’re going to say, and I’ll tell you what I tell you every time: fault isn’t objective.”
Karen doesn’t respond.
“They couldn’t take her out,” Alice says. “They said there were complications that made surgery … unsafe. So they couldn’t take her out. I had to wait until I delivered her on my own. That was the worst part. I’d heard about it happening before. Someone had a friend who had a friend who this happened to. Something like that. So, I knew that it happened, but still … this idea that your daughter is inside of you, and has been relying on you, but that you’ve suddenly somehow betrayed her … like, without any input from you, your own body has suddenly made an active and deliberate decision to murder the one thing you’ve created that has the potential to be worthwhile. And in case you want to forget, in case you want to have a few glasses of wine and remind yourself that you’re capable of being happy, you can’t. Because there the evidence is: decaying inside of you.”
Alice wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“It’s sort of crazy, isn’t it? I keep calling her my daughter, like she was actually here or something, but she never even took her first breath, and I’m a liberal. It’s like I’m completely fucked up about a life that’s totally imaginary.” She looks down. “I’m sorry, Karen. I’m completely messed up.
“Anyway, Ale … my boyfriend left. A month later. McKinsey offered him a position in Buenos Aires, and he took it. I want to blame him. I feel like it would make this all so much easier. If I could just say, ‘What a shitty thing to do, leaving me alone like that.’ I can’t, though. I was a fucking monster. I wouldn’t let him touch me. Not even when she’d finally been … I wouldn’t let him touch me. Twice I told him it was his fault. Didn’t provide any evidence, didn’t cite any examples. Just yelled at him and said he was the reason our daughter was dead.”
She considers what she’s edited away: How, a week after it happened, she crashed her bike into the side of a taxi. The driver complained that she’d done it on purpose; she told the police that she’d had too much to drink, even though the alcoholímetro the cop was using suggested she’d hardly had a sip of beer. How getting out of bed each morning was becoming a more and more herculean effort. How she started showing up to work late and unfocused: three weeks before the baby’s due date, she mistyped four figures into a spreadsheet, which—if her boss hadn’t caught it—would’ve cost the company over a million dollars and Alice her job. How it was becoming harder and harder to get a bottle of wine to last more than a single night.
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. From Buenos Aires I heard he went to Santiago. When I came back to L.A. at the end of that year I considered trying to track him down, but…”
“Yes?”
She tries to remember how many e-mails she sent, and how many bounced back. One every week, she figures, for almost a year. Fifty-two.
“But I just didn’t.”
She remembers how she forbade her brother from investigating Alejandro’s whereabouts on Facebook or Google or anywhere else. Paul had just started at the University of Michigan, and he had taken his spring break to travel down and be with Alice. Donna and their father had come with him. Eloise had promised to fly over from London, but some big disaster at the charity ended up happening at the last minute, and she had to cancel her trip. In her stead she sent Alice a dozen irises, along with two new bulbs, planted deeply in glazed ceramic pots. Even in the darkest times, the accompanying card had read, hope springs eternal.
They were all sitting in Alice’s living room when a man driving a beat-up VW van swung by with the delivery.
“What a lovely thing for your sister to say,” Donna said. She was folding laundry on the couch. “How thoughtful.”
Paul scoffed. “It’s condescending, is what it is. Condescending and cliché.”
Alice remembers watching their reflections float across her dark television screen as she counted the days until they’d all just leave.
“Alice?”
The women stare at her; Karen cocks her head to one side. Upstairs it sounds like a riot has erupted: a bunch of munchkin feet sprinting in every direction at once, voices clambering over one another to be heard.
“I’m done,” she says.
Paul
June 10
The mannequin slams against the hood of the Nissan, leaving it with a watermelon-sized dent. Breaks squeal and tires smoke. From where he’s standing, curbside, Paul can hear Rick Erwing’s suicidal crie
s of disbelief as the poor son of a bitch white-knuckles the steering wheel. Paul looks down at the mannequin, whose arm is bent above its head at an impossible angle and whose mouth is frozen in a clownish, inanimate smile.
“You need to throw them harder than that,” Goulding says. Paul can feel the doctor’s breath on the back of his neck. He smells coffee, lurking behind a thin layer of Listerine. “I want their heads to roll. Literally. I want the mannequins to fall apart. I want Rick to see them fall apart.”
“My arm feels like it’s about to fall out of its socket,” Paul says, rubbing his right shoulder. Strewn at his feet lie an army of mismatched figures: nippleless women, castrated men, prepubescent children, Band-Aid-hued babies the size and shape of footballs. He thinks about how he’ll have to spend the next hour hurling them at Erwing’s car as he drives in circles around the parking lot, and his arm aches more.
“Think of all the good you’re doing,” Goulding says.
Inside the car Erwing bangs his head back against his seat. The clinical worker sitting next to him makes a note on her clipboard.
The doctor continues, “Before he came to us, this man could hardly pull out of his driveway without thinking that he’d run over someone. And I’m not talking about just some idle worry, Paul. Like how you or I might wonder throughout the day if we remembered to turn off the lights before we left the house. Rick was consumed. He’d have to stop every ten yards or so to check the tires for blood and little bits of brain. It would take him nearly two hours just to get around the block, and then once he’d done that, he’d be worried that he missed something, so he’d have to start the whole thing all over again, retracing his steps.” Goulding wipes sweat from his glasses with the end of his tie. “That’s crippling, Paul. That’s no way to live.”
Paul swats away a gnat. Philadelphia celebrates summer by exploding in bugs.
“And you think this is actually helping him?” he asks.
Goulding’s mouth twitches, and Paul worries that he’s insulted him. “I’m sure of it,” he says. “Absolutely sure of it. The first two months he spent on the couch were helpful to get the lay of the land, so to speak. But if he’s going to be free of this thing, this sort of immersion therapy is necessary.”
With the polished toe of his loafer, Goulding nudges one of the mannequins. A bald, sexless eight-year-old. “Speaking of, let’s give it another go, shall we?” He unholsters a walkie-talkie from his belt and Paul hears static, the sound of Velcro being torn apart. “All right, Marcia,” Goulding says. “Let’s try again.”
Paul watches Rick Erwing shake his head and mouth a tirade of silent pleas. Marcia reaches her arm through the sunroof and confirms Goulding’s instruction with a thumbs-up.
Goulding lifts the mannequin by its left ankle. “Use one of the kids this time.”
“You know, my right shoulder is really starting—”
“Paul, I really need you to be a team player here.”
The Nissan’s ignition sputters to life. Heat waves dance across the empty parking lot.
“Sure,” Paul says. “Of course.”
The car swerves around a cone, and he thinks of the conversation he had with Mark last night, which was a reenactment of the same conversation they’ve been having for the past two months. They’d been in the kitchen. Mark was cutting leeks for a frittata, and Paul sat across the counter from him, his chin resting on his fist, his gaze locked on the spice rack on top of the fridge. On Mark’s iPod Nina Simone crooned, and in his head Paul repeated the word curry enough times for it to lose its meaning.
Between the two of them, Mark’s the more skilled and knowledgeable cook. It isn’t that Paul is a total mess in the kitchen, it’s just that with Mark around there doesn’t seem to be any point in trying. He’s always there to step in, to stop Paul from burning butter, to show him a better way of slicing onions. He navigates a stove with a sexiness that makes Paul feel content with, if not dully embarrassed by, his own incapability.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked him. “You’ve got a face like a wet weekend.”
A pan with caramelized onions sat on the stove, and the kitchen grew claustrophobic with their smell.
“A what?”
“‘A face like a wet weekend.’ A bad mood. It’s a saying.”
“Huh.” He’d never heard Mark use the expression before. He let his eyes trail down from the spice rack to the fridge’s white face, strewn with magnets that they’d collected over the nearly four years they’ve been together: a black-and-white shot of the Empire State Building at night; a Winston Churchill saying, now clichéd, given to Paul by one of his mentors from grad school; a magnetized save-the-date for Preston and Crosby’s wedding. He imagined the other expressions coiled up in Mark that he’d never heard him use. Pithy turns of phrase that might be sprung on him in the next hour, day, month, year. How, once he’d heard one of them, he’d spend the rest of the day wondering where Mark had learned it, and how it had managed to not become a character in their story until now.
The hardest part of a relationship isn’t staying with the people we love—it’s actually getting to know them.
“No,” Paul replied. “I’m not in a bad mood. Or not really, I guess. Thoughtful, maybe. But not bad.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” Mark scooped the leeks into a mixing bowl.
Paul considered this; he thought about the looming headaches that would unravel if he were to speak. He spoke.
“I just … are you sort of waiting for my green light with all of this, or something?”
Mark tossed a fistful of chopped peppers into the bowl. “What do you mean?”
“Just with this … open relationship idea. Am I the roadblock to that?”
“I never said I wanted an open relationship.”
Outside a streetlamp flickered and succumbed to the night.
“Okay, fine. Monogamy with terms and conditions. Whatever you want to call it.” Paul leaned forward and plucked a pepper from the bowl. “Are you waiting for my … like, my go-ahead with it?”
“I guess?” Mark pinched salt into the bowl. “Yeah, I guess that’s probably true.”
Paul looked down and drew circles on the counter. He said, “I don’t even know what that would look like. If we did what you’re suggesting, I mean.”
Mark wiped his hands against his pants and reached behind him for the rosemary. “It would probably look very similar to how it looks now,” he said. “Except that we’d be more open to situations that we might have otherwise been closed to. Hey.” He reached across the table and tapped the top of Paul’s head. “Are you stressed out about this? Because you shouldn’t be. If it’s something that you don’t want, then—”
“This doesn’t stress you out?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the prospect of all this. Of us sleeping with other people. It doesn’t stress you out?”
“Not really.”
“How—”
“Because I know you’re not going to leave me.” Mark shrugged. “And I’m not planning on leaving you. We’ll set rules, and we’ll follow the rules, and the relationship will probably be better because of it.” He thrust a spoon into the bowl and began tossing the mixture in tight, quick loops.
The Nina Simone track ended in a fizzle of violin. A bit of pepper lodged itself between two of Paul’s molars.
“You sound so sure about all this,” he said.
Mark shrugged for the second time. “I am.”
And this is the part of Mark that astounds Paul, because if Paul is sure of nothing, if his life amounts to a sort of walkabout through a vistaless ambivalence, then Mark is sure of everything. The best way to cut an onion, the direction the economy is headed, the healthiest means to confront the boredom of monogamy. It doesn’t matter if any of those beliefs is ever proven wrong. His sureness can’t be rattled. He’d just acrobatically throw his stock into being sure about something else. And he’d do it all with a blithe conf
idence that at once scares Paul and makes him dreadfully envious.
* * *
The Nissan slows and speeds up again. Sweat pools above Paul’s lips. He grips his mannequin child tighter.
“Okay,” Goulding says. “Get reaaaaaaady…”
Birds chirp on a telephone wire high overhead, indifferent to the insanity unfolding at their feet. Erwing steers the car around the lot’s last corner, and its tires groan. Paul swallows. He tastes starchy memories of the dumplings he had for lunch.
“THROW IT!” Goulding shouts.
Paul hurls the child as hard as he can, and his right arm protests with a white-hot pain. There’s the clamor of plastic against steel against asphalt, the familiar burnt-rubber screech of four bald tires. He looks up expecting to find the mannequin reduced to a pile of out-of-whack limbs, but instead sees it sitting upright, calmly, like it’s just sat down to take a rest. His shoulders slump.
“Goddamn it, Paul!”
The birds flutter away, annoyed. The Nissan rolls to a stop.
“I—I thought it was harder?”
“You thought!?”
A slow rage boils near the bottom of Paul’s throat. He swallows it down.
“Sorry,” he says. “Next time will be harder.”
Goulding squeezes the bridge of his nose, and Paul counts as he takes seven deep breaths.
“All right.” He cleans away more sweat from his glasses. “Everything’s all right. We’ll just … try it again. And Paul, this time, please—”
Paul says, “I know. I got it.”
* * *
Mark cut off a thin slice of frittata and reached it across the counter. “Here, try this. Tell me what it needs.”
Paul bit down—it was delicious. Hearty and filling. It needed nothing. Mark’s cooking rarely did.
“Salt. Just a little more,” Paul said. “Don’t you think it’s just asking for trouble, though?”
“What’s asking for trouble?”
“I don’t know, this whole other people business. The whole thing feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who’s to say that one of us won’t fall in love with someone else?”