Everyone Remain Calm

by Megan Stielstra

  I found out I was pregnant in the women’s bathroom at Uncommon Ground, this fancy coffee shop on the North Side. I was there to meet a friend for lunch, and on the way I’d had this feeling. It’s tricky to describe—I wasn’t nauseous, or achy, my period wasn’t running late or anything but for some reason I stopped at Walgreens and bought a two-pack Clearblue Easy Test. I’m sure lots of people have experienced this next part: sitting on the bathroom floor and waiting, waiting, waiting, trying not to look at your watch as the three minutes tick by between peeing on the stick and your whole life changing. I’d done this one time before, long ago in an Italian hotel, nineteen years old and scared out of my mind. Please please please, I’d repeated, hands clasped together and eyes shut tight. The guy was long gone and I was new to foxhole religion. Please please please. This time, I was thirty-one; good job, money in the bank, and a husband I was so crazy about I could hardly breathe sometimes. Please please please, I said, but this time my eyes were wide open and the words meant something different. Seconds ticked by and my heart beat fast and I wanted that fucking plus sign so bad I thought I’d explode that bathroom, bricks flying from the walls and leaving me sitting on the tiled floor amidst rubble and dust and exposed plumbing. It was positive.

  I didn’t believe it, so I did another one.

  Then I went back to Walgreens and bought two more.

  Positive.

  Later, when I told Christopher he was going to be a dad, he threw both fists in the air home run–style and yelled, “I am captain of the swim team!”

  Back at the Golden House, I had a forkful of waffle halfway to my mouth when Dominick’s dad got loud. “Are you kidding me? Why do I have to pay for it?” The mom went off next, long strings of sentences filled with obscenities and across the table Christopher raised his eyebrow. It was that uncomfortable moment when you realize you’re listening in on someone else’s private conversation and probably that’s rude, so you try not to, but eventually you just give up. They’re too loud—loud and nasty—and after a few minutes the facts become evident: he was emotionally unavailable, she cheated, somebody had to pay the mortgage, who would get the kid, he’d sue her ass in domestic court, she’d love to see him try it and on and on they went, yelling their heads off but not hearing a thing. You’d think they were speaking different languages: the words came out in English but then got caught in some giant web, so by the time the other one heard what was said, it could’ve been Greek or Czech or Japanese for all they’d listen, and I shuddered to think that only five minutes before I’d envied them. Dominick started wailing then. Who could blame him? I didn’t even know these people and I wanted to cry.

  “I can’t sit here anymore,” Christopher said, and I nodded—I felt sick, like last month when a whiff of coffee had me running for the toilet. We left some cash on our table, still covered with untouched plates, and went for the door, hands locked together against that couple’s yelling and their little boy’s crying, and out into the lazy Sunday sun. “I promise,” I whispered to my kid. “I promise, I promise, I promise,” and Christopher squeezed my hand as we crossed the street. I know what it meant—that squeeze. It could’ve been Greek or Czech or Japanese, but still—I knew.

  14| Logic

  “Every night I go to bed with you and you won’t touch me,” I said to my husband. Then I waited, watching his face. It glowed in the late night TV light but didn’t change, just twitched a couple times and was still. “So,” I said, “I found somebody to touch me in the afternoon.”

  “Well, isn’t that a kick in the teeth?” said Conan O’Brien.

  My husband didn’t say anything.

  Mostly I got a lover ’cause I was lonely, but part of it was I wanted Bobby to stop me. I wanted to see if he’d fight for me, like knights challenging each other to duels all the time. No medieval girls had to wonder if their men loved them, what with everybody swearing everybody’s troth all the time, and wearing everybody’s pledges in the cuffs of their armor.

  I remember the time my dad was docking his fishing boat and me and Mom were walking up the pier to greet him. Some greasy guy in rubber overalls leaned over a pile of rigging and said something to her that started with “little lady,” and ended with “whaddya say?” but my eight-year-old vocabulary didn’t have time to piece the middle together ’cause Daddy down the dock was already on his feet swinging an industrial shark pole with a fresh-caught hundred-and-twenty pound halibut over his shoulder. The fish hit the guy square in the face and knocked him flat. It took forever to get the thing disconnected from him ’cause the hook had gone through the halibut’s throat and into the guy’s eye, and I had to step back from getting blood on my boots. My dad had taken out a guy’s eye for even saying the wrong thing to my mother, but when I told my husband I was sleeping with Eustis Kane, he didn’t even react.

  I met Bobby a couple Novembers ago, me working at the breakfast place and him coming in on his lunch break. He’d sit there drinking coffee and reading the paper and I’d stand at the far end of the counter, wiping down sticky syrup bottles and staring at him. He was big and bulky, had dark hair, wore thrift store button-up shirts, chewed on his cuticles. He never said a word to me besides coffee, sugar, or pancakes. I hadn’t had a crush in months and didn’t see any other readily accessible options, and since he was cute I let myself fantasize, give him history and personality. After a while, I was damn near crazy about the Him I’d made up.

  I’d wait for an excuse to stand near him, monitoring how far back he tipped his head when he drank and when he’d hit a certain angle I’d refill his coffee cup. By the fourth or fifth the hand holding the newspaper was shaking against the counter top. He never really looked at me though, not even when he mumbled thank you and dropped dollars down. I’d go home and do quizzes in fashion magazines.

  If your man isn’t giving you everything you need, should you:

  Change him;

  Leave him;

  Find someone else who can.

  Since my man was all in my head, I didn’t think it possible that he couldn’t deliver everything I needed. When I imagined him, he was perfect.

  After a couple months of this behavior I went stark raving crazy and tapped his water glass with a fork to get his attention. “Excuse me,” I said. “You see him?” I nodded my head at the guy sitting at the counter eating French toast. “That’s Stan. He and his ex-wife are fighting in the courts about who gets to keep their little girl, Dinah. And him,” I continued, pointing to the guy at his left with the omelette, “he’s on that diet where you only eat eggs and cheese cubes wrapped in bacon. And that guy sells fluorescent lighting to big corporate businesses and that lady lost her job two weeks back and is always reading the want ads and that kid down at the end is in love with Stella who works here but she thinks he’s creepy so she always makes me serve him and it’s torture because he just sits there, watching her at her tables, it’s enough to break your heart!”

  It seems to me that once I start talking I never can find a place to put a period and for that whole time I was babbling away Bobby just stared at his forkknifespoon combo and chewed on the inside of his cheek. But there was a second there that he glanced up at me—just a little single second, half a blink even—and I took hold of that and turned it into this huge meaningful victory in my mind so I’d have the guts to keep going.

  “My point,” I said, setting down the coffee pot and leaning my elbows on the counter, “is that all these people come in here every day and they talk. They tell us everything, like we’re hairdressers, and we know all the right questions to ask, like How’s your sick uncle? or Did you get the lease on that space? but we don’t know a thing about you. Not your name, not your story, not squat, only that you’re in here every day, and friend, the food ain’t that good.”

  The newspaper started shaking then. He’d only had two cups of coffee so it couldn’t have been the caffeine. He was looking
at the salt and pepper shakers so he wouldn’t have to look at me, like maybe there were bugs in the salt and pepper shakers, or gold or something. “I’m Bobby,” he said in this super careful voice, and then he grabbed up all his stuff and left in a hurry. One-two-three I counted and he came running back in, dropping money on the counter and saying thankyouverymuch like it was a single syllable.

  I stood there, staring at the space he’d vacated. “What just happened?” I asked. I wasn’t asking anyone in particular except maybe God, but all the waitresses I work with took that as their cue to step in and tell me what was what.

  “He’s shy,” said Joan. Joan was eighteen and a virgin.

  “You should wear your skirts shorter,” said Stella. She was twenty-four and a 36C.

  “Crack him over the head,” said Elaine. She was twenty-nine and in a hurry.

  “Shoot him in the head,” said Pearl. Pearl was thirty-three and twice divorced.

  “Give it time,” said Roberta. Roberta was fifty-four years old and had been married to the same guy for more than half of them. “After I met Sam,” she said, “it took me three years to convince him that he couldn’t live another day without me.”

  So I made a deal with myself to take it one step at a time with Bobby. Every time he came into the restaurant I’d increase the number of words I said to him by one. I’d ease us into each other, sort of like when you quit smoking you smoke one less—ten a day, nine a day, eight a day—’til you’re down to nothing.

  “Hi,” I said, and I filled his coffee cup.

  “What’s up?” I said the following week while filling his coffee cup.

  “How you doing?” I asked politely as I filled his coffee cup.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, filling up his cup of coffee.

  Somewhere in there I started counting those cups. One cup of coffee, ten cups, twenty, forty and all he gave me in return were split second glances and shaky papers. After a while I got frustrated with all the counting on my fingers underneath the counter and decided if he didn’t pay attention to me by the time I’d poured his hundredth cup, I was going to throw the goddamn pot at him.

  “Seen any good movies lately?” Forty-six cups of coffee.

  “How long have you lived here?” Sixty-five cups of coffee.

  “Seen any good want ads in there?” Eighty-nine cups of coffee.

  “Can you explain this Kuwait business to me?” One fucking hundred.

  The coffee pot is glass with an orange plastic decaf handle. It sits sizzling on a burner while slow roast drips into it. I picked it up in my right hand, turned and faced that silent, shaky, beautiful son of a bitch, and flung the pot Frisbee style down the length of the counter. He looked up from his books a spilt second before it hit him full on the side of the face, smashing into his temple and shattering into four solid pieces, boiling coffee exploding and glass slicing into skin.

  A couple days later I cashed in a half-day’s worth of tips and sent an FTD bouquet to the hospital. Dear Bobby, said the attached card. I hope you are doing better. I’m sorry I threw the pot but sometimes you can’t control your impulses. Sincerely your waitress, Francine.

  It was a week before I saw him again. He came into the restaurant with a white gauzy eyepatch and a purple burn across his cheek, and sat down in his usual spot. I approached him with a cup of coffee and held my breath.

  “No girl gave me flowers before,” he said. It was the first sentence I ever heard out of his mouth that didn’t include proper nouns indicating breakfast food.

  “I’m not like most girls,” I said.

  “Most girls say that,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say back. You’ve got to watch it with those quiet ones, hardly ever open their mouths but when they do it’s with something that’ll kill you. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said finally, reaching out for the burn and then pulling my hand away before it got there. “I just wanted you to notice me.”

  “I always noticed you,” he said; then he smiled.

  That, ladies and gentlemen, was the first time I saw my husband smile.

  Eventually, things go stale. Bobby’d come home late from work, sneak into bed, and wake up early. He said it was because his construction business was taking off and I needed to be supportive. Then he said I’d have to be patient. Then he said I needed to back off. Even with all those then he saids, he never said much. He wasn’t what I’d imagined him to be and I was starting to hate him for it, starting to feel more alone with him than I had without him.

  So what do you do?

  Change him;

  Leave him;

  Find someone else who can.

  I started leaving books by Deepak Chopra around the house and he ignored them. I stayed up ’til he got home with a list of conversation topics written on the back of my hand and he said he was too tired. I started to wear crazy see-through things and he asked me What the hell did I have on? It was after I marched naked into the living room in the middle of the night and yelled, “What do I have to throw at you this time, Bobby? A coffee field?” that he stopped touching me altogether. He’d duck into bed smelling like sawdust and flip over facing the wall. I’d watch his back shiver in sleep, knowing if I didn’t find something else to think about, I was going to surge my brain.

  Eustis Kane is what I found. He was night security at the glass factory and spent his days sitting at my counter, eating eggs and staring at me. I’d never had anybody stare at me like that before. I mean, I’d seen the look, like when my friend Shirley and I would go play pool. We’d walk into the place and some guy’d be bent down over the pool table with his cue lined up on the eight ball, performing some right-angled geometry, and he’d slide the stick through his fingers, giving it a test run or two, and just before he’d let ’er rip he’d be compelled by some higher force—you might say the Lord but I’d wager it was pheromones—to look up and see Shirley. It was all over then, ’cause they’d lock eyes, all hard and penetrating and silk sheet grin, eyebrows lifting once, twice, suggesting something, licking lower lip, like a sailor knot tied the two of them together in the electric space between their bodies. So you see, I knew what the look looked like, it was just that nobody had ever looked at me that way until Eustis Kane started sitting at my counter every day from noon ’til two-thirty.

  I didn’t have a good feeling about him. “Weirdo at nine o’clock,” I’d tell the other girls, but day after day with somebody shooting that kind of heat in your back, things start burning, let me tell you, and maybe it was so many nights of watching Bobby’s back in bed, or maybe it was me running to the ladies every morning at eleven-forty-five to freshen my lipstick, or maybe it was just the simple ease in knowing—absolutely one hundred percent sure—that this here fella wanted me. There wasn’t any doubt. No replaying our conversations back over in my head to find where the innuendo was. No eating my liver trying to figure out what the hell he was thinking.

  So you could say I was feeling vulnerable on the afternoon Eustis Kane followed me home after work. You could say I was lonely when I nodded my head in the direction of the bedroom. And you could say that I really, really, really needed to get laid when I pulled his belt out of its loops and put my hands on his hips. He’s six-foot-five and skinny like a nail, ribs sticking every-which-way out of his chest, his spine-bones poking in hard knuckle-bumps out of his back, every joint sharp and stubbly and pushing skin up and off his body like a windbreaker on a skeleton. We’d lay there, every afternoon from when my shift’d end at three ’til right before Bobby got home for supper, bedsprings poking up and into my back and pelvic bones poking down and into my front, but it was skin-on-skin and that felt real. The heat was stifling in midday August and sat on us thick like fur, the blankets kicked onto the floor, the fitted sheet skewered sideways from sex gymnastics so my butt was on cotton sheet, and my shoulders were on foam mattress pad, an
d my legs were in the air.

  Afterwards, I’d lay with my chin at his armpit, tracing stringy muscles with my fingers, starting high at the knot in his neck and moving down his pointy shoulders: biceps, triceps, wrist, five bumpy rocks topping each finger. Can I get everything I need from this man? I’d wonder as I ran my hands along his sides and felt for the crunch hard tips of his ribs, just like you do when you debone a salmon. Or maybe I could mix the two of them together into one, like how eggs and oil make mayonnaise? I imagined grabbing Eu’s rib bone in my fist and sliding it out of his side like a sword out of its sheath, dropping it to the floor and under the bed. When he’d get up and step into his pants, he’d seem shorter than before. The next day I’d take another one, and he’d have to buckle his belt a couple notches tighter. The day after that he’d be bending forward, curved like some cripple’s cane. By the time the whole rack of ribs was hidden under the bed, Eustis Kane would have nothing left to hold him together in the middle and he’d cave right in, just skin and meat and goop. I’d rub him off me and put the sheets in the wash, and when Bobby would get home from work that night there’d be a pile of bones on a platter on the dining room table.