by Neil Hetzner
“What would it be? T-ball or…”
“It’s T-ball.”
“What do you think?”
Bill was sure that Dilly would say no. If Roger were to become involved in a T-ball league she would get to spend even less time with him except for sitting in the stands. From talk at work, Bill knew that T-ball games were famous for their interminable length. Bill guessed that Dilly would have developed the statistics on injuries and broken them into classes—shoulder, neck, eye, paralysis. The more time Roger spent in a car the greater the risk of being in a wreck. Disfigurement. Death. If he were carpooled, he could be exposed to candy, gum, ice cream, a hot dog, soda. Caries. Diabetes. Cancer. It was obvious to him that T-ball was much too risky for Dilly to allow their son to play.
“Might be good. But…”
Bill knew the “but” was the lock on the door to Roger’s playing.
“But…?”
“Well, he’s got so much energy that he might get frustrated. Baseball’s pretty sedentary. You think it’d keep his interest?”
“It might. Baseball’s hooked a billion other boys.”
“Okay. If you can find him, tell him the news. He’ll be thrilled. A chance to hit something other than his sisters. Twenty minutes more here and dinner’ll be ready.”
Bill nodded to Dilly’s back and made his exit without turning his back to her. Less than an hour later, Bill learned that the unnamable odor had been the smell of baking egg white and sugar. Pie. Strawberry meringue pie. Bill had been as stunned and, immediately afterward, as talkative as any of the kids. Dilly had offered no more explanation for this unique event other than to note that egg whites weren’t all that bad and that life was too short not to be treated once in awhile.
As they got ready for bed Bill worried that Dilly would try to re-enact the events of the night before. He readied several layers of excuses and made himself yawn emphatically three times. As he undid his belt and unzipped his pants he wondered what would happen the following week when he would have to explain, as he climbed into bed wearing new snug-fitting cottons briefs and a bag of ice, that his distrust of her had caused him to have a vasectomy.
* * *
Each night as she prepared herself for bed, Dilly would tell herself that the next morning she would know that her mating had worked. As soon as she awoke, she listened to her body. She touched her breasts to see if any soreness had begun. She searched for the smallest lapping wave of nausea against the side of her stomach. It had taken almost two weeks with the girls, but she had known within days when she became pregnant with Roger. Dilly was sure that she must be pregnant, but each morning she learned that she must be patient for another day for her symptoms to appear.
While daffodil buds filled and more and more birds returned to the cover of the leafing bittersweet, Dilly pushed her thoughts to Christmas and beyond. She would be eight months huge at Christmas. She had never been pregnant at that time of year before. Jessie, Kate and Roger all had been summer babies. Heat rash. Swollen ankles. Slogging more than thirty extra pounds, mostly fluids, almost a quarter of her weight, through the thick, still, water-filled, oxygen-emptied air of late July and August. It had been wonderful. Amidst the throbbing of her lower back and the crushing of her kidneys, she had sewn new ruffles to the canopy of an old bassinet. She had wall-papered the nursery using her belly as a third hand to hold the clean-smelling pasted paper to the wall. She had reveled in the aches of her knees and ankles as she had brushed water-based white enamel along the nursery baseboard. In December there would be so many things vying for her attention. She would need to get her present shopping done early. If she had to pay more because she shopped early, Bill would just have to accept that as one of the necessary accommodations to her condition, no different than staying close to a bathroom to release a thimbleful of urine. There could be ice or snow. She would need to buy shoes with very good traction. If she delivered just three weeks early, she would be in the hospital while the kids were home from school for Christmas vacation. Who would babysit them? Lise? She seemed to call every week.
As Dilly planned her pregnancy, black thoughts dived at her dreams like crows after robins’ eggs. Bill could be gone. She could be left raising three kids with a fourth on the way. A million things could go wrong trying to draw a new baby from an old egg in an old body. What would she do if the amniocentesis or sonogram revealed some terrible flaw? Should she even wait for amnio? Maybe she should have chorionic sampling done. Bett could be dying, needing her while she herself needed her mother. Bett could be crippled. Or dead. Or so could she. She would be thirty-nine before the baby was due. What if something happened to her? What would happen to the kids?
When ravening thoughts tried to destroy her hatching plans Dilly’s rage flew up to defend against them. This was right. It was right for her and, soon, soon after she told him, Bill would know that it was right for them. This baby would take her until she was forty-five. She would know what to do with every day. By the time she was forty-five she would know what to do next. She was sure. But… If she didn’t… At forty-five, Jessie would be eighteen. Eighteen and a long breath and there would be more babies around. And if there just were enough babies around, then being left-handed or cancerous or divorced or strange just wouldn’t matter.
It was right. She knew it. She was no different than anyone else. Or anything else. Fear of death begat life. That, of all things, must be right.
* * *
Bill continued to rehearse his lines. He was sure the nurse, who kept poking her head in and out of the waiting room door, was going to begin a conversation which would call for using the lines that he had been piecing together in spare moments since he first had made the appointment with Dr. Osterin. Sitting in the doctor’s office, going over his excuses for why his wife was not with him, gave him the same feeling of oppressive heat that had overwhelmed him once in third grade as he had sat in a chair outside Principal Raymond’s office waiting to explain how Ralph Tingel’s steel ruler had ended up in his book-bag.
Bill’s rehearsal stopped when, once more enjoining his attention, his fears demanded that they wanted to imagine the operation just once more. He could remember that several other men at work had had it done, but, at the moment, he couldn’t remember who they were. At the time, standing by the print machine or on the way to the elevators, it hadn’t been so relevant. It was no different than hearing someone had bought a new car. He wouldn’t expect himself to remember the details of that either, unless he were getting ready to buy one, too.
“Mr. Phelps? This way, please.”
Normally seeing such a round bottom so tightly encased in a white nylon skirt, set so high upon white nylon-hosed legs, with all of the nylon making the sound of a short zipper being opened and closed, would have caused some kind of stirring in Bill, but not today. Today, the cicada sound of the nurse’s legs as they led him down a pale brown corridor disoriented him.
“In here, please. Please remove all of your clothes and put on the gown that’s on the hook there. The doctor will be with you in a moment.”
As he slowly undid the knot of his tie and fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, Bill felt himself drifting away. He was choosing to lose a part of himself that could never be regained. For a second he confused the loss. He thought that he was mourning a certain aspect of his maleness, but, immediately, he corrected the error. He was losing more than the free flow of his sperm—which, if he wanted, might be able to be reversed. The real loss was that he was cutting himself free from the weight of the last dozen years of his life.
Bill’s thoughts caught him up short. If he really were cutting himself free, shouldn’t he be feeling a peace-filled lightness rather than the shoulder-rounding heaviness that he was experiencing? He tried to tell himself that the most important consequence of the operation would be that he would be assured of his future. The feeling of lightness that he wanted would come; it just was still in little in front of him. It was a gift yet to be e
xperienced.
Bill’s tie went on one hook, his shirt on another and his pants on a third. Being both private and fastidious, he was unsure what to do with his black socks, salted with tiny flecks of dried skin, and his crotch-creased boxer trunks. Making a pile of them on the plank that served as a seat in the changing alcove seemed too public. Balling socks and folding shorts which had been worn seemed weirdly. Stuffing them into the briefcase that held his new briefs seemed unsanitary. He wished the staff had thought to provide a drawer where he could hide his things away.
After he had slipped his arms into the open-backed hospital gown Bill felt more vulnerable, more naked, than when he had had no clothes on at all. He half-sat on the edge of the examining table staring at the whiteness of his tightly compressed knees.
She had been strength. He had met Dilly while working as a newly-minted engineer. During the day he had watched his boss absorb, codify and evaluate data and, then, make decisions with speed and certainty. Herm Murray could define and solve a problem while he himself was still floundering with the data trying to bring enough order to it so that he had some idea of what the problem might be. At night he had experienced much the same sensation. His undefined life whirled around him. He had spent so much energy in college getting good grades that he hadn’t really considered what would come afterward. He had tried to make some sense of his new life, but no order would come until he met, observed, and soon admired how the friend-of-a-friend, Delia Koster, make decisions with alacrity and sureness. He was drawn to her strength and assuredness. She had been drawn to him, or, as Bill ruefully thought as he stared at the almond-shaped space that was formed when he pressed his knees and ankles together, to his needs. When he had met Bett, he had understood where Dilly got her competency. It was only later, during a course on organizational behavior, that he came to appreciate the difference between control and competency.
As he sat and waited for Dr. Osterin, Bill realized had been as foolish as Dilly. He and she both had confused control with competency. Over the years, as his decision-making skills at work became better and as marriage, home-owning and children had left few areas in his life where important decisions needed to be made, he had found himself becoming resistant to the same control by Dilly that he once had craved. He came to bridle against her direction as a horse would to a whimsically jerked rein. Bridling against arbitrary control was one thing. What he was doing now was something else. He was making a decision that, at rare moments, he had guessed could end his marriage. Bill looked over at his clothes to see if he wanted to put them back on, but concluded choosing to do that would take as much energy as remaining half-naked on the table. He wished that Dr. Osterin, who he imagined to be a bustling type of man, much like Dilly, would come through the door. He wanted someone in charge in the room with him; he wanted someone around with enough energy and direction to carry him through his decision.
The door opened slowly. A low, tentative voice said, “Mr. Phelp?” Bill nodded. He had expected someone older and he certainly had expected a man.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Marks. Dr. Osterin’s been called out on an emergency. How are you feeling?”
Bill drew his legs up tighter.
“Fine.”
“That’s good. You’re aware of the procedure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s go over it again quickly, just so we’re sure.”
* * *
As he stepped through the doorway, Bill was surprised at how far the sun had fallen. He had checked his watch several times during the first couple of hours after the surgery, but, then, as the anesthetic wore off and the pain wore on, he had forgotten to keep track. It was almost five o’clock. His appointment had been for ten-thirty. It had taken almost five hours of icing to bring the swelling down. As he had lain in bed after the procedure watching the swelling and following the discoloration of the bruise as it spread down toward his thighs and up to his belly, he had had moments when he himself joined in his body’s outrage; however those moments of rebellion at his metamorphosis had passed. He reassured himself that he had made the right decision. Finally, the yellow-green of the bruise reached its limits; the cold crystals of ice turned back the edema. He was given his freedom.
Bill walked to his car gingerly. He eased himself backward onto the seat in imitation of arthritic old men in the parking lots of malls and supermarkets. When he finally was settled in, he let out a big sigh.
The sound of the motor catching startled Bill. He suddenly realized that all the planning he had done for this day had failed to include the next six hours. In his script he had gone from recovering in a darkened room to responding to Dilly’s panicked, “My God, what happened to you?” with a single, sweet, whispered word, “Vasectomy.” Now, he discovered he had a whole evening that he had to get through before he could whisper his victory cheer. He chided himself for his poor management. He couldn’t go home yet. He cringed at the thought of Roger running up, as he often did, to give him a wild hug. What protection would he have against Kate wanting to sit in his lap for a quick story or to share a few minutes of TV? Although it hadn’t happened lately because he had been too busy, he knew enough of the ironic tendencies of fate to know that those things would happen tonight if he went home too soon.
As he sat in the car with the motor running, Bill considered his possibilities. If he went into Boston to the office to pass the time, there would be colleagues, working late, wondering where he had been all day. He was too sore to sit all night in the car or in the close quarters of a movie seat. He tried to imagine himself at some friend’s house chatting, but he couldn’t see himself on any of his friend’s sofas and he had no idea of what he would want to talk about except the growing pain in his groin. He certainly didn’t want to talk about what he had done to himself. After going through his alternatives, he decided to check into a motel. There would be peace and quiet, a bed and ice.
When he was told that a single room would cost him seventy-two dollars, Bill found that his hand resisted passing his credit card over to the curt clerk. Seventy-two dollars was almost a month of lunches. He would be paying fifteen dollars an hour for the use of a bed.
Without quite letting himself know where he was going, Bill drove to the nearest Route 128 entrance, aggressively merged his way into the bumper-to-bumper stream of cars travelling in the break-down lane, and just after six o’clock found himself in front of Nita’s law office.
The front door was unlocked, but the reception area was empty.
“Nita?”
“Yes?”
Her hello was warm but a bit puzzled as though she recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it.
“It’s Bill.”
“Hi, Bill. C’mon back.”
Again, from her tone, he wasn’t sure that Nita knew which Bill was there.
“Bill. My God. How are you?”
“I was in the area and thought I’d drop by. Never seen your office.”
Nita’s eyes gave a quick sweep around the spartan room filled with yellow file cabinets, a fax and copying machine before the ends of her mouth pulled down.
“What do you think? Rich, not gaudy? I’m kind of a techno-esthete. Let me finish getting this fax off. Take a look around. Library’s back there and so’s my office. I’ll just be a sec.
The library walls were nearly filled with various series of seriously bound books—in burgundy with gold lettering, in black and silver with red lettering, in red and brown with white lettering. Bill thought that all the books were better looking than the standard engineering references. In one corner was a computer terminal and printer. He looked at the output spilling from the bail and realized Nita used the equipment to access some kind of database. Seeing the paper covered with arcane abbreviations made Bill feel, for the first time ever, a connection to his sister-in-law. He often did the same kind of electronic search. Feeling that connection motivated Bill to leave the library and find Nita’s office.
Bill stood
leaning against the door frame to try to find some relief as he looked at where Nita worked. Gray carpet patterned with a small rose triangle. White cube desk. Black and chrome chair. A white, probably birch, table with brushed steel legs. Two tall, thin stainless steel vases on either end of an ebony-topped credenza were filled with white-tinted dried grasses. There were neatly stacked piles of paper on both the birch table and on one end of the credenza. In the middle of the credenza, four accordion files, rust colored and fully expanded, reminded him of building materials, perhaps brick pediments. The top of Nita’s desk was clear of files. Bill nodded. A second thing they had in common. As Bill looked at the console telephone, he realized that he needed to use it. He walked back down the gray and pink wall-papered hall.
“Nita, could I make a quick call?”
“Sure, my office or the receptionist’s desk.”
On the first ring Bill realized that he had dialed before planning what he wanted to say. He considered hanging up, but before he could make the decision, he was relieved to hear a small formal voice, “Koster-Phelps residence. Katherine speaking.”
“Hi, Kate, it’s Daddy. How are you?”
His daughter’s phone manners continued.
“Just fine, thank you. How are you?”
Bill looked down to his lap.
“Honey, tell Mommy I want to talk…”
He caught himself and started over.
“Kate, tell Mommy that I have to work late. I won’t be home for dinner. I’ll see her later, and when I get home I’ll be sure to come in and give you a nighty-night kiss.”
“That would be very nice, Daddy. Thank you very much. I’ll give my mother the message.”
“Thank you, Kate. Bye-bye.