by Celia Laskey
“Whatever you say, ma’am.” Neal raises Rosie’s tail with one hand, and with the other he begins to reach inside. Rosie steps from side to side in the small amount of space within her head gate, then stills as Neal’s hand disappears from view. A moment later, shit starts shooting out with surprising force. Neal steps back so it doesn’t hit him.
“Got to clean out the feces so I can feel what I’m doing in there,” he says, grinning, and I wonder if he chose this job or if it was circumstance or desperation. I try to breathe out of my mouth. He continues pulling out more feces than I would have thought could be contained in one animal, even one that size. A friend has a one-year-old son, and the other day she posted on Facebook about how diapers couldn’t contain his BMs, how poop would spill out and pour down his legs. Other mothers commented about how this had happened to their kids, too. The joys of motherhood! they wrote, followed by the laughing and crying emoji.
I notice something else coming out of the cow, a strand of clear, shiny liquid streaming out of her vagina. Like water, but thicker.
“That’s the slick,” says Neal. “That’s a good sign.”
I turn away, trying to focus on how idyllic the cows look scattered throughout the field, eating grass and flicking their tails. But now I can only picture this being done to all of them, over and over again, for their whole sad, predictable lives. Neal is still rooting around inside Rosie, his hand making suction sounds, the shit splatting onto the ground below.
“You want to go feed her that pear now?” he says with an I-told-you-so overtone.
“I’m fine.” I swallow hard and force myself to look back.
He takes a wad of paper towels out of his pocket and wipes at the cow’s crap-covered vagina. Then he pulls the AI gun out of his overalls, where he had been keeping the “business end” body temperature. He inserts it, making a face of intense concentration.
“Now I’m feeling through the wall of the rectum to make sure the tip of the gun has reached the cervix,” he says. “Bingo.” He depresses the plunger.
Only then do I walk around to the front of the head gate and pick up a pear from the bucket. I hold it out to Rosie. She sniffs it, then turns away. She blinks slowly, her long, pale lashes swooping over her dark irises. I reach out my other hand and let her sniff it before scratching the brown tuft of hair on top of her head. I hold the pear out to her again, and this time she swings her head to the side and knocks it out of my hand. I kneel down and peer into her eyes, searching for something behind the black inertia, but all I can see are my own eyes reflected back.
* * *
• • •
“BABIES ARE LITTLE DICTATORS,” says Tegan, whom I’ve met for lunch to discuss the Baby Freak Out. She’s the only one I can talk to about it, since all my other friends either have kids or are chomping at the bit to have them.
“I’m picturing a baby wearing Kim Jong-il glasses,” I say.
“Oh my god, yes, and that khaki safari suit he always wore.” Tegan cracks up, spitting iced tea back into her glass. “I’d have a baby if I could just perpetually dress it up like a dog on Halloween.”
“And that’s exactly the kind of thing a person who doesn’t want a baby would say.” Who am I now? A person who wants a baby or who doesn’t? I always figured I’d have kids. It’s not really something you question when everyone around you is doing it and has been doing it for like five million years. What was it we sang on the playground? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.
On cue, a mom walks in with a screaming baby Björned to her, and a preschooler on a scooter. The kid on the scooter bumps into a woman in line, and when his mom tells him to apologize, he says, “Why don’t you apologize!”
I throw my head in my hands.
“Aw, Lizzie, you need to relax,” says Tegan. “You’re thirty-one. You have plenty of time to figure it out.”
“But when I made my five-year plan five years ago, I said I’d have my first kid by thirty.”
Tegan reaches across the table and steals some of my chips. She crunches them openmouthed. “This is part of your problem, the lists and the expectations and the constant ‘shoulds.’”
“It’s not just my expectations this time,” I say. “I think Derek really wants this. The other day we were unloading groceries from the car, and the neighbor’s kid wandered into the road with his ball. Derek made this judgy face and said, ‘Our kids will never play in the road.’ Our kids. Like it was this foregone conclusion. What do I tell him?”
“Tell him the truth. You need time to think about it.”
Scooter kid and his mom sit down at a table near us. The kid takes a bite of his sandwich and does a happy wiggle. He holds the sandwich in front of his mom’s face. She leans down and takes a bite, then she does a happy wiggle, too. They laugh together, a happy family once more.
* * *
• • •
BACK AT WORK, I meet with an employee who lost her index finger while putting a beef shoulder through the saw blade. Something we don’t tell new hires is that if you make it five years at a meatpacking plant, you’ve got a nearly fifty percent chance of suffering a serious injury, and Carla has been here for four and a half. I know it’s the company’s fault, with their impossible quotas for production lines—we’re up to four hundred cows an hour now—but the chain cannot, and will not, stop. Not if our workers can’t keep up, not if we see cow shit smeared all over the place, not if they lose a finger or even an arm.
“I’m sorry this happened to you, Carla.” We’re instructed to apologize in the vaguest way possible, so it doesn’t seem like we’re admitting fault. If we can, we should try to turn the situation back around on the employee. It wasn’t our quota, but their negligence.
She nods. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“You know how important it is to stay alert while on the line,” I say, hating myself.
She nods. “I know, ma’am.”
I wait for her to say something about the increased quotas, the impossible speed with which workers have to move, but her mouth stays closed. She must need this job. She must need it desperately.
“On a separate note, I thought you could use some good news. Your five-year anniversary is coming up, and the company is prepared to offer you a five percent raise.” This is far less than we owe her, even if she hadn’t lost a finger.
Carla’s eyes widen; the corners of her mouth rise. “Really?”
“Yes.” Ask for more! Ask for more, you dummy! I scream at her telepathically.
She lets out a sigh, not of resignation but of relief. “That’s great news, ma’am. I really appreciate it.” She looks down at her watch. “Is that all? My break is almost over. I should get back to it.”
The diligent employee, even as she’s getting screwed. “That’s all,” I say. “But go ahead and take an extra fifteen minutes today. Maybe you could step outside and enjoy the sunshine. If anyone asks, tell them I said it’s okay.” A scrap I can toss her.
She presses her lips together. “Maybe I will,” she says, and I know she won’t.
After she walks out of my office, I feel so guilty that I watch cat videos for half an hour. In a compilation called Kitties vs. Kiddies, a toddler tries to throw a cat in a pool, but the cat whips around and the kid ends up falling in the pool instead. I laugh out loud and am about to send the link to Derek when I realize its anti-kid implications. So I send it to Tegan instead. Cats > kids always & forever, she writes back.
* * *
• • •
“WHAT DO YOU want to do tonight?” Derek asks when I get home. A few weeks ago, he was laid off from his job as assistant manager at Applebee’s, and he hasn’t had much luck finding something new, though to find something you generally need to expend some amount of energy looking. After glancing at the classifieds for a few minutes, he spends the rest of the
day playing video games. By the evening, he’s usually dying to get out of the house.
I’m tired and could easily spend the night zoning out in front of the TV, but instead I say, “We could see a movie.”
“We’ve seen all the movies that got decent ratings.”
“We could see a bad movie. What about that one with Jennifer Lopez—”
“I’m going to stop you right there.”
“Okay, we could . . .” I open the dishwasher and start loading in dirty dishes. “Babe, remember what I said about the coffee cups? You have to soak them, otherwise the brown ring won’t come out.”
“We could go to Pizza Hut again,” he says, even though we’ve already been this week.
“Do you want to go to Pizza Hut?”
Derek throws himself onto the couch and pulls down the skin below his eyes, making a zombie face. “See, this is why we should have a kid, so we won’t care that there’s nothing to do.”
“That’s why we should have a kid?”
He shrugs. “Or, you know, to give our lives meaning,” he says, too sarcastically for it to actually be sarcastic. “You haven’t said a word about it since I brought it up last week.”
I hold a knife encased in peanut butter under the hot stream of water and wait for it to melt off. “That’s because I don’t really know how I feel about it.”
“I don’t understand where this uncertainty is coming from. We’ve always said we want kids. I meant it. Did you?”
“It’s easy to say it when it’s hypothetical, Derek. When it’s far away.” I think about the part in our vows that said, “I take you as you are now, and who you are yet to become.” We got married nine years ago, right after college. We were both twenty-two. We’ve been together since our junior year of high school, when—true to teen movie tropes—Derek was a quarterback and I was a cheerleader. We lost our virginity to each other. Got our acceptance to KU on the same day. After we graduated, we agreed we’d move back to Big Burr so I could eventually take the reins at King Beef. We’ve always moved in tandem. Some part of me assumed that if I was unsure if I wanted kids, Derek must have been feeling the same way.
Derek sits on the couch, pulling on his earlobe. The skin turns bright red between his thumb and forefinger. “So you don’t want to, then?” His voice is sharp, accusatory.
The knife is still slick with peanut butter. I drop it back into the sink and it clangs loudly. “I literally just said I’m not sure. That doesn’t mean no.”
“Okay,” he says. “Just let me know whenever you make up your mind, I guess.”
“I know you’re upset because I might be changing my mind about a baby,” I say. “But what if you never change? Isn’t that just as bad?” I try to picture Derek as an old man, but it’s impossible. In my mind he looks exactly the same, just in a sweater vest and orthopedic shoes. He’s barely changed since I met him: his hair still parted on the left, his lower lip sticking out due to his overcrowded teeth and his refusal to ever get braces, the gray polos he buys in bulk at Old Navy.
“Why do I need to change?” he asks, incredulous. He reaches for his earlobe, then stops himself, clasping his hands in his lap and pressing his fingertips into the spaces between his knuckles. “If we didn’t have a baby, what would you want to do that’s so different?”
I open my mouth, then close it.
“Right,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”
* * *
• • •
WE GO TO a party at Tegan’s boss Karen’s house the next night. Mid-century modern furniture is artfully placed around the living room and synthy electronic music pulses from bamboo speakers. Somehow, it smells like the beach: salt water, coconut sunscreen. A photo of a vintage orange Beetle parked next to a squat palm tree hangs over a polished chrome dining table. Avery, Karen’s daughter, sits at the table reading a book despite the party going on around her. Derek wanders off to find the bathroom, so I sit down next to her.
“What’re you reading?” I ask.
She turns the cover to face me: The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. “It’s funny,” she says. “I’ve read it before but now it’s hitting me in a whole other way.”
“How so?”
“Well, you know how the main character lost his dick in the war?”
I nod, laughing a little bit at her bluntness.
“The first time I read it I barely registered that part. But now it’s, like, all I can see. He’ll never be able to have a romantic relationship. Not really. And it’s the same for me.”
“What do you mean?” I had thought just her legs were paralyzed but now I wonder if the injuries were more widespread.
Avery gives me a dead stare. “Come on. Who’s going to want to fuck a girl in a wheelchair?”
I fumble for the right thing to say. “There might be some people who wouldn’t, but who would want anything to do with them? Besides, things might change. You’re still doing physical therapy, right?”
She gives me another, deeper, stare. “I go to physical therapy to humor my mom, because she can’t accept the truth. I’m never going to walk again.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do,” she says. “My life will never be the same, all because we came to this stupid town. It’s not fair, but it’s what happened.” She presses her lips together and shrugs, then wheels herself down the hallway.
I hold my hand to my chest, my heart thumping hard. What do you do, as a mother, when something like that happens to your kid? It’s one thing to know you can’t protect them from everything. It’s another to feel partially responsible for something catastrophic. Derek comes back from the bathroom and joins me at the table. “It’s a little . . . chichi in here,” he says, squinting at the photo of the Beetle.
“Oh,” I say, still distracted by the conversation with Avery. “I think it’s nice.”
Derek surveys the snacks on the table and scoops a mountain of hummus onto a pita chip. “This is really good,” he says. “Tastes homemade.”
I nod and dip in a cucumber slice. “We could make our own, too. It wouldn’t be that hard, if we used canned chickpeas.” When we woke up, we agreed to let the fight go, but all day we’ve been making small talk like we’re coworkers in a break room waiting to use the microwave.
We sit there, dipping and chewing, dipping and chewing. “Okay, we’ve gotta stop,” says Derek. “It’s really rude to show up to a party and eat all their homemade hummus.”
We move to the couch and eavesdrop on a conversation-in-progress between Tegan’s coworker Jamal and Karen.
“So my brother and his husband told the adoption agent they wanted a black baby,” says Jamal. “And she says, ‘Well, at least it’ll be cheaper.’”
Karen grimaces. “I take it they’re looking for another agency, then?”
“They’re thinking of using a surrogate now, despite the cost, because they’re so tired of dealing with this bullshit. It’s been years of nothing going their way.”
I take a drink of my gin and tonic so I won’t have to make eye contact with Derek. If we had to go through all that to have a baby, would we? I feel like I’m wasting some gift I’ve been given but didn’t ask for.
“And I thought choosing a sperm donor was hard,” says Karen.
“What’s this, more baby talk?” says David, another one of Tegan’s coworkers. He wanders into the living room and drapes himself across an armchair, clearly a little drunk. “Babies babies babies. You can’t meet a man these days who doesn’t have one or want one. I need a time machine back to the days when guys were sucking each other off in back rooms, not painting their picket fence white like straight people.” He looks at me and Derek. “No offense.”
“What makes you think I want a picket fence?” I say.
“You don’t?” David says. “Tell me more.”
/> Derek shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares into his drink.
“I don’t know. Never mind,” I say.
“All of a sudden she’s not sure if she wants kids,” Derek says, chuckling meanly.
David puts a hand on my shoulder. “I feel for you. Straight women have it better than me in some respects, but not this one. No one expects gay men to have babies.”
“That’s the problem,” Jamal says. “Anyone who doesn’t fall in line feels that pushback. You’re straight? Why haven’t you had a baby? You’re queer? Who said you could have a baby? You can’t win.”
* * *
• • •
I RUN INTO Carla in the break room the next day. She stands in front of the microwave, watching a plastic-covered tray rotate in the bright light.
“How are you, Carla?” I ask.
“Fine,” she says. “Another day, ya know. How are you?”
“Fine, I guess.” I pour a cup of coffee.
“I heard you visited my uncle’s cow-calf operation the other day.”
“Neal is your uncle?” I search her face for potato-y resemblance.
She nods. “What did you think?”
“It was something,” I say, and almost leave it at that, but for some reason I go on. “Honestly, it was a little depressing. All those heifers cranking out babies that are just going to come here to be slaughtered.”
She shrugs. “The circle of life. We’re not so different.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why it’s so depressing.”
“What can ya do?” She takes her tray out of the microwave and pulls off the plastic film, steam billowing out. Her meal looks like some kind of Alfredo pasta with cubes of chicken. She lowers her hand over it like she’s going to poke her index finger in the middle, then stops. A thick square of gauze covers the stub where her finger used to be. “It’s the darnedest thing. I keep forgetting it’s gone,” she says.
