Voices down the street made Jaqe look up to see a small group of people leaving a house and heading for their cars. In the dim light they all looked to Jaqe like skeletons. Skeletons in coats and boots, skulls in hats and earmuffs, laughing and chattering, bone hands opening car doors, skeleton arms sticking out of sleeves as they waved goodbye. Jaqe squeezed shut her eyes. When she looked again, skin and meat safely covered the bones. God, she thought, I’ve got to get some rest. And then, Please. You promised to leave us alone. You promised.
Three months passed, and Jaqe went into the park once more to stand under the tree. She wore a warm coat now, and a scarf Laurie had specially bought for her one night from a street vendor under a full moon. She walked around the tree until she found a single brown leaf, sodden with snow, lying right at the base of the trunk. Jaqe studied it, even taking off her gloves to trace the lines with her finger. She couldn’t really see anything, and yet she found herself crying, with her shoulders quivering and her chest making soft hiccuping noises.
She felt a tap on her shoulder, and when she turned around a woman in a red coat and hat and a blue scarf smiled and held out a hand to her. Jaqe jumped back until she realized she didn’t know the woman, who was simply smiling and holding out a small package of tissues. Jaqe smiled back, took a tissue, and blew her nose. When she realized she had crumpled the leaf, she dropped it and walked home.
Four months passed and the last snow came, replaced two days later by warm air like a soft blanket draped over a waking child. Patches of green replaced brown in the park. In the city’s largest church, women dressed as gargoyles ran up and down the aisles shouting “Murderer!” at the priest. They threw fake blood on the organ and the altar and the statues of the saints.
Jaqe’s mother called. She and Jaqe’s father wanted to apologize, she said, for speaking “in the heat of the moment.” She waited, as if Jaqe would say, “I’m sorry too, Mommy,” but Jaqe said nothing.
Five months passed and young men dressed as medieval fools broke into a corporate meeting to invite the executives to a dance of life, a procession against disease. Jaqe went to her parents’ for the weekend. She returned with a package of baby clothes from a cousin whose husband had gotten a vasectomy after their second child. When she got back she found a note from Laurie, who’d gone several hours earlier to play softball in the park.
Six months passed and the tree in the park grew berries, shiny red balls picked by birds and groups of foragers under the guidance of men in hiking boots, long pants, and shirts with long sleeves. In a bar one afternoon, Laurie complained to Louise about the breathing classes she had to go to with Jaqe. “It’s not the exercises,” she said. “It’s the class itself. I mean, it’s full of all those straights. Newlywed types. And yuppies. I don’t know which is worse. The newlyweds are all smiles and glows, and the yuppies are all serious. Do everything right. Just like making the right career moves. And they’re all straight. And married. None of them are even just living together. Can you believe it?”
“How do you know?” Louise asked.
“Because when the class started, the teacher called them all Mr. and Mrs. and nobody corrected them.”
“Maybe some of them are lying.”
Laurie shrugged. “Who the hell cares? We’re still the only dykes in the whole class.”
“Do you get any—”
“No, no one bothers us. Everyone pretends not to notice. No stares or smirks, everyone’s happy to talk to us. They just have a little trouble figuring out what to say. I mean, the women don’t know what to say because I’m not the one that’s pregnant. And the men don’t know because I didn’t make her pregnant. And you know they’re just wondering who the hell did.”
Louise said, “You should come back to the DCC.”
Laurie shrugged. “How can I? I’m not a student. I’m an old married woman.”
“You don’t need to be a student. We miss you.”
“Half of you don’t even know me.”
“They’ve heard about you.”
“Oh, great. The living legend.” Laurie tried to sound disgusted, but Louise saw the way Laurie brushed back her hair with her hands, extending the long tapered fingers like combs.
Laurie leaned forward. “You know the worst? You want to know the worst?” Louise nodded. “The men are all so fucking caring. So sweet. And concerned. And dedicated. Shit, it’s like they’re all trying to be women. And you know something? They’re doing a better job of it than I am. And I am a woman.”
“I know,” Louise said. “I noticed.”
Laurie sighed. Not for the first time, not even the tenth, she thought of kissing Louise. She thought exactly how she would do it. She’d touch her hand and then maybe her leg, just above the knee, not long. Then maybe a stroke of her shoulder, the hand sliding down like slow water. They’d be smiling at each other by then, and by the time the kiss started it would come without any nerves. Exciting, oh yes, with all the thrill of that first time you kiss a woman. But no nerves. Inevitable. She looked at Louise and started to smile. And instead broke out laughing.
For a moment, Louise squinted at Laurie, then she too started to laugh. Laurie looked at her and shook her head, and Louise laughed again. “Come on, you old married woman,” she said. “Let’s go see Jaqe.” They got up. “Maybe we can bring her some booties.”
Seven months passed. Malcolm, a man in Jaqe and Laurie’s building, began to talk to people who couldn’t hear him. He’d read an article, he told Laurie, about how you could help people in comas by telling them the news, saying you loved them, telling them how everyone missed them. If it helps with comas, he thought, why not with other situations? He talked to news announcers on television, encouraging them to report good news. When he read a novel he talked to the characters, telling them they could make better lives for themselves. In a rainstorm one night, Laurie saw him standing in the street. The next day he told her how he’d stood there over an hour, just repeating “It’s all right. It’s okay. No one’s going to hurt you. Calm down. It’s okay.”
“I know it sounds kind of weird,” he told Jaqe, “but don’t you and Laurie talk to the baby?”
“The baby’s alive,” Jaqe said.
“Well, sure, but it can’t hear your voice. It probably wouldn’t even understand English. Anyway, the rain is alive too.”
One day he came running into their apartment, waving a book. “Look,” he said, “look at this.” The book was the Tibetan Book of the Dead and it explained how the Tibetans sit with their dead bodies and talk to the soul for forty-nine days.
Jaqe pulled Laurie into the bedroom. “Get him out of here,” she whispered.
“Come on,” Laurie said. “He doesn’t mean anything. He’s just excited.”
“I don’t care. Get rid of him.”
Over the next weeks Malcolm took to slipping into funeral parlors late at night. He would claim to be a relative who couldn’t sleep and wanted to sit with the body. All night he would whisper encouragement, assurances of a safe journey, of joy and adventures, interspersed with news, gossip, weather reports. Then he would slip out before morning and the arrival of the family.
When he got caught one day and the police allowed him a phone call, he called Laurie. Only, Laurie had left for work, and it was Jaqe who answered the phone. She refused to talk with him, said if he put the police on she’d claim she’d never heard of him. When he shouted at her, “Then just tell Laurie. Please!” Jaqe hung up.
Eight months passed. The berries on the tree grew plump and dark, almost heavy enough to drop off by themselves. Jaqe’s blood pressure floated upward. She stopped eating salt and lay on the couch all day, watching the same cable news features over and over. Safety featured very strongly in these reports. A man had invented a personal shield, lightweight and easy to carry yet made of the same material and strength as police bulletproof vests. Various people interviewed said it sounded like a valuable adjunct to urban living, only they wondered if they could
get it in front of them in time to stop the bullet.
Other news items stressed personal expression. A man wanted to draw pictures on the roofs of Jaqe’s city. Looked at alone, each roof would contain meaningless lines and squiggles. But if you went up in an airplane—or better yet, a space station—the buildings would vanish and you would see spiders and trapezoids and crouched cats and ornamental circles on the wings of birds with human feet. “Messages for the ancestors,” the man called the drawings and Jaqe imagined her great grandparents, and their parents, moving into abandoned space stations. The idea upset her, and she changed the channel.
A woman came to the door, and Jaqe had to get up. The woman wore shorts and a tank top, and carried a clipboard. She came, she said, to do a building census—how many units, how many apartments and how many storefronts or offices, how many occupied and unoccupied. She asked Jaqe, “Do you know if anyone has ever been born in this apartment?”
“Not yet,” Jaqe said, and smiled as she looked down at her belly.
“Oh, wow,” the woman said. “You must think I’m really dumb. Well, that’s great. I mean, the baby.”
“Thanks,” Jaqe said.
“And do you know if anyone’s ever died here?”
“No,” Jaqe said. “And no one’s going to.”
“Hey,” the woman said, “I didn’t mean anything.” She held her clipboard up as if it were a personal shield. “They just tell us what to ask. That’s all.”
“I’ve got to lie down,” Jaqe said. She slammed the door.
At first she thought that the pain was in her side and that it came from slamming the door too hard. Only when she sat down on the edge of the bed and the pain jerked her backwards did she realize that the “thing,” as Laurie called it, was happening. And then the pain vanished, and Jaqe just sat there, not sure what to do, wondering if it was real, if she should do anything. She realized she didn’t want to call Laurie, she didn’t want to hear Mark say that Laurie had gone out and he didn’t know where. Or worse, she’d tell Laurie and Laurie would say she couldn’t leave, she had to stock inventory or something.
It was warm that day, and even with the windows open, Jaqe was sweating. She gasped again, thinking it was the pain until she realized it was something else, the sound of a motorcycle. She went to close the window. With her hand on the wooden sash she looked down to see a child, a girl about seven in a ragged dress, playing hopscotch. All by herself, and with great concentration, the girl moved among the chalked squares, back and forth, as if her fate, or the fate of her family, depended on it. Jaqe began to cry, a deep longing that pushed its way through her body. And then the pain kicked her again and she knew she had to call Laurie.
Listening to Laurie almost made Jaqe start crying again. Laurie spoke in a wild rush, telling Jaqe to call the doctor, saying how much she loved her, how maybe they should meet at the hospital, and saying “Right, right” when Jaqe reminded her it would take hours before anything really serious happened. At least, she thought to herself, that’s what the book said.
Mark sent Laurie home in a taxi. Laurie thought of the last time her parents had visited her, how they’d taken her and Jaqe to a French restaurant and given them cab fare home, which Laurie had wanted to spend at a disco and take the subway home, but Jaqe wouldn’t let her. Sitting alone in the cab, Laurie missed her mother, even her father. She knew it was the fantasy she missed, the let’s-pretend parents. “Even so,” she whispered, “it was such a good fantasy.” Now she was about to become a mother herself—or a father—or something. She couldn’t believe it. What the hell was she going to do?
Labor lasted two days. Much, much too long, Laurie thought. She and Jaqe followed all the exercises, the breathing, the massage—nothing shook loose the thing. Laurie found she couldn’t think of it as a baby, just as an object hurting Jaqe and making her scream. Even though the midwife kept rubbing Jaqe down and soothing her belly, and telling her she was fine, everything was okay, Laurie kept expecting some doctor to pull her aside and tell her Jaqe was lost, they could save the damn baby, but Jaqe was lost.
After two days, Laurie and the doctors decided to persuade Jaqe to agree to a cesarean. Jaqe might have agreed right away if the doctor who’d talked to her hadn’t had red hair, and hadn’t stood next to Laurie. “Leave her alone,” Jaqe kept saying, and both Laurie and the doctor had assumed Jaqe meant the baby, and together they tried to reassure Jaqe that no one would harm the child. Jaqe just became more and more frantic. And then the doctor touched Laurie’s arm, and Jaqe shouted, through her own jolt of pain, “Let go of her! She promised. I need her.”
Laurie felt herself blush. “It’s okay,” she told the doctor. “She doesn’t know—I mean, she usually—she’s not jealous usually.” She thought, Shit, I can’t stand this, I just can’t stand it.
The doctor smiled at Laurie, who blushed again. “It’s all right,” she said. “Women in labor are officially absolved from all responsibility for anything they say or do. Didn’t anyone tell you that? We’ll send in someone else.”
After the operation, with Jaqe still unconscious, and the baby sleeping in the nursery, Laurie sat outside the coffee shop in the hospital lobby, with her head down and her elbows on her knees, and told Louise she felt ashamed. “I just feel, I don’t know, I guess I feel unworthy. Does that sound crazy?”
Louise said, “Jaqe’s a lot to be worthy of. But even Jaqe can say something dumb. Especially when she’s screaming in pain.”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Laurie said. “The thing is—” Her back curved lower, as if she wanted to hide between her own legs. “The thing is, she was right.”
“What?”
“I mean, I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know the woman. But I thought about it.”
“Well, so what?” Louise said.
“Shit, there’s Jaqe shrieking in pain, out of her mind almost, and I’m sizing up some hot number.”
“Come on, you don’t even know if she was gay.”
Laurie shrugged. “She was,” she said, and Louise laughed. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I was thinking about her, and not about Jaqe.”
“Oh sure,” Louise said, “you’ve got to think about Jaqe every moment. Goddess help you if you fantasize about someone else.”
“When she’s in pain like that, shouldn’t I be thinking about her?”
“Weren’t you? Haven’t you made yourself sick thinking about Jaqe?”
“I guess so,” Laurie said. “Sometimes it seems like all I really think about is me.”
“It’s called being human. Women are human. Men are allowed to think of themselves all the time, but not women. We’re supposed to put everyone else first.”
Laurie said, “Spare me, okay? You know, the whole time Jaqe was there, groaning and grabbing hold of me, I just kept wishing I was somewhere else. I kept feeling like everyone was staring at me—because I wasn’t a man. I kept wishing I could run away. Or wave a magic wand.”
“Women don’t use magic wands. We use cauldrons.”
Laurie smiled. “Yeah. Poor Jaqe. She sure could have used a magic cauldron. Or something. And those goddamn breathing exercises. They didn’t do shit.”
“You’re just scared,” Louise said. “And that’s okay.”
“Is it? What are Jaqe and I going to do with a child?”
“What anybody else does. Raise her. Go goo-goo. Bounce her on your knee. Dress her in ruffles and wheel her proudly through the neighborhood.”
“Thank God at least it’s a girl.”
“Goddess,” Louise said, and they both laughed again.
“Give me a hug,” Louise said. Laurie looked around. “Don’t worry about it,” Louise told her. “No one’s going to care if you and I hug each other. And I give you permission to fantasize about me. All you want. Because I’m sure going to fantasize about you.” Laurie laughed again, and reached out for Louise. With her arms around Laurie, Louise whispered, “Congratulations, Mom.”
La
urie grinned. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “Just don’t call me that.”
Near Laurie and Louise, a group of men in black suits and black felt hats sat around an older man with a gray-white beard that reached halfway down his chest. The older man wore a top hat, as if at a wedding. When he stood up, one of the younger men bent forward and kissed the older man’s hand.
While Laurie looked at the men with a fascinated disgust, Louise went over to them. Though the young men formed a loose wall between Louise and their leader, Louise managed to peer through them. “My friend’s just become a mother,” she said, “and she’s kind of nervous. Do you think you could bless her?”
“Louise!” Laurie cried, and ran to yank her away. The men said nothing, just stared curiously after them.
In the recovery room, the light hurt Jaqe’s eyes. She saw a woman in a rag dress, holding open her arms, smiling. Jaqe wanted to run to her, but she couldn’t move. She’d eaten, or drunk, something, and now she couldn’t even find her legs. The woman’s hair looked on fire, her arms gigantic. “No!” Jaqe screamed, and heard her own voice in a whisper. “I won’t go.”
“Honey?” came a voice. “Sweetie? It’s me.”
“Laurie?” Jaqe said. She managed to reach up a hand. Laurie grabbed it before it fell. “Hi,” Jaqe said, feeling dumb. She wondered if Laurie was crying. The lights and the noise made it hard to see. Laurie bent over and kissed her fingertips—not at all the way she’d done it that first time, but still it reminded her, and she smiled.
“How are you feeling?” Laurie asked.
“Okay, I guess. Where’s the baby? I want her.”
“She’s fine,” Laurie said. “She’s in the nursery.”
“She’s okay? They haven’t found anything wrong, have they?”
“She’s perfect. She weighs six pounds and seven ounces. She has squiggly little hands and toes, and right now she’s fast asleep, dreaming of her mommy.”
Jaqe tried to laugh—Laurie talking like that!—but it hurt, and she made herself stop.
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