Early Morning Riser

by Katherine Heiny

  Duncan spread an old but clean moving pad on the grass while Jane looked around for familiar faces. Some of her students were here with their families, and the students turned excitedly to point her out: There she is! My teacher! Jane smiled and waved. Freida and Mr. Hutchinson were on a blanket closer to the front—Freida always wanted to be near the musicians—and Aggie and Gary were seated on a blue quilt with a picnic basket open between them.

  “Hello, Duncan!” Aggie called. “Hi, Jane! Jimmy, would you like to come sit with us? I made fresh cinnamon doughnuts.”

  “I sure love those doughnuts,” Jimmy said, trotting off toward them happily.

  Jane sat down next to Duncan. The only thing she wanted more than a fresh cinnamon doughnut was time alone with Duncan. They had so little of it. Sometimes Jane thought her marriage was less like the divine union of two souls and more like when Mr. Gaska and Mr. Bagley combined the feedstore and the pet-supply shop into one business so they could lower operating costs. Really, wasn’t that what she and Duncan had done? They had knocked down the wall dividing their lives and converted them into one bigger life so they could care for Jimmy. They would not be married now except for Jimmy, and no one knew that better than Jane. It was a practical arrangement, only faintly tinged with romance. Oh, there were exceptions, of course. Like the day of their wedding, when Jane had stepped out of the car in front of the courthouse wearing a marmalade-colored crochet dress from the thrift store and her hair pulled into a topknot circled with daisies, and Duncan had looked at her in a way that made her feel as if she were floating. Or once when she’d come upon him unexpectedly in the checkout lane at Glen’s, and he’d said to the cashier, “Wait, I want to get some croissants for my wife,” and his voice was so pleased and proud. Or when he woke her in the small hours—even on a school night!—to make love, saying, “You looked so beautiful sleeping there. I can’t wait until morning.”

  But an enormous part of their lives—the bulk of it, Jane felt sometimes—was shared with Jimmy or given over to the care of him. They had breakfast together, and then Duncan and Jimmy left for the workshop and Jane left for school. At least Jane had the escape of teaching—Duncan worked with Jimmy all day long. Jane wondered how he could stand it, but Duncan remained as mild and cheerful as always. They all arrived home at the same time in the evening, and had dinner together, and watched television together, and shopped together, and went to the beach together and to restaurants, and—well, Jane supposed it was what other couples did, only she and Duncan and Jimmy did it as a threesome. Always, Jimmy was there, asking questions like “Where’s the orange juice? Where’s the butter? I think we’re out.” (Jimmy seemed incapable of remembering the refrigerator had a door.) Or, “I’m pretty sure I locked the workshop, but would anything terrible happen if I maybe forgot?” (And Duncan would reach for his car keys.) Or Jimmy would be using the computer and call out, “Is it okay to click yes on this box that just popped up?” (“No!” Jane would leap to her feet. “Remember last time!”) At least they no longer had Taco Tuesdays, but it was a hollow victory. Meaningless. Every night was Taco Tuesday now.

  But here she was, alone with Duncan at least for a little while. She leaned against his shoulder. He put his arm around her and tugged at the ends of her hair.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and Jane knew by his tone that he was going to propose some home improvement. Probably he wanted to add some extra shelves to the pantry. She’d seen him in there earlier, trying to retrieve a jar of applesauce without causing ten other jars and cans to tumble to the floor.

  But what Duncan actually said was: “I think we should have a baby.”

  Truly, it was more shocking than if Mr. Gaska had said that to Mr. Bagley.

  * * *

  —

  They talked about it late that night in bed, the moonlight filtering in through the window and seeming to fill the room with pale blue smoke.

  “I just thought, you know, I wouldn’t mind the occasional child,” Duncan said softly. Jane wore a silky lavender nightgown, and Duncan’s hands roamed over her body, not in a sex-initiating way, but the way someone would touch the velvet nap of a favorite chair.

  “That’s the thing about children, though,” Jane said. “They’re not really occasional. They’re pretty full-time.”

  “Well, I guess I meant just one child,” he said.

  “Are you sure you don’t have one or two children already?” Jane asked. “Statistically, it seems like you should.”

  “Oh, no,” Duncan said calmly. “No woman has ever thought I was a good bet to have a baby with. They were all pretty outspoken on that subject, and downright fanatical about birth control.”

  It’s true: you can’t help who you fall in love with. That doesn’t always make it easier, though.

  “So what do you say?” Duncan asked. In the moonlight, his face was all angles and shadows.

  Jane had a theory that people spent too long deliberating small decisions and not enough time considering big, important ones. How many days—surely it added up to days—had she agonized over whether to cut bangs? How many hours had she spent debating the merits of wood versus laminate flooring? How many minutes of her life had she given over to working out the number of calories in a salad? How many times had she visited the thrift store, looking for the perfect black cashmere sweater? (The answer: a lot. Cashmere isn’t often donated.) And yet, people got pregnant all the time just because one person was too lazy to get out of bed and hunt up a condom, people bought houses after a single viewing, people chose colleges based on whether the cafeteria served caffeinated beverages, people sent their mothers to drive other people’s mothers home without thinking about it at all.

  So she decided not to overthink this.

  “Okay,” she said to Duncan. “Okay.”

  That was in May. By June, Jane was pregnant.

  * * *

  —

  Almost immediately, Jane’s pregnancy began making itself known in all sorts of ways. First there was the nausea. Endless rolling nausea without vomiting, nausea that spun out before Jane like a curving country lane meandering through a hilly green landscape, the end always just out of sight. And when she did eat, it was only rice and pasta. Well, also popcorn and Skittles and Fritos and milkshakes. Vegetables had acquired a strange metallic taste. And meat was revolting, how could people not see that? Bleeding red muscle, that’s all beef was. And goose-pimpled chicken with congealed yellow fat. Sausages that looked like intestines. Ham the color of sunburnt flesh. Jane moaned just thinking about it.

  And the fatigue was like nothing Jane had known before. Had she really, at other points in her life, thought she was tired? That was ridiculous, laughable. Embarrassing, really. Only pregnant women—possibly only Jane—knew true exhaustion. Weariness that made it feel as though she were wading through knee-high molasses, as though her eyes were hot stones in dry creek beds, as though her head were so heavy it might roll off her shoulders onto the floor. During morning recess, she sat on a bench in the playground with her sunglasses on and napped upright. During lunch, she went out and slept in her car. During videos, she put her head down on the desk and slept until she woke up with drool dampening her cheek, the whiteboard showing nothing but the home screen of her laptop. She came home after school and slept on the couch until dinner.

  Her breasts were sexily swollen, making her previously unremarkable blouses and cardigans suddenly home to cleavage that rivaled Aggie’s. Jane thought she no longer looked like a teacher; she looked like a teacher in a porn film. She was also constipated, and she had waves of dizziness that made it seem as if the horizon were tilting, the world collapsing.

  Her sense of smell was amplified, improved, sharpened—it was like a superpower now. She could smell coffee on Duncan’s breath from the next room, the neighbors’ marinated flank steak from next door, hair spray from the salon on the nex
t block, even fresh blacktop being laid in the next county. One night, watching an episode of Forensic Files about a tracking dog who located a young girl’s sweater in more than five square miles of wooded hillside, Jane thought, without irony: I could do that.

  Worst of all were the mood swings. Although, actually, could it be considered a mood swing if it only swung one direction? Maybe it was more like a mood acceleration. Like the needle on a speedometer that whipped straight from zero to annoyed and stayed there. Because it seemed like the world was in an unkindly conspiracy to irritate Jane. Duncan drove her crazy by fondling her new breasts at every opportunity, Jimmy told rambling stories that made no sense, Aggie remarked that Jane looked so much prettier now that her face was fuller, Gary spent an entire evening with a little wad of mashed potato in the corner of his mouth, and Freida called Mr. Hutchinson “sweet pea.” Mr. Robicheaux looked so startled—so witless—when Jane asked him if he had any extra blue construction paper that Jane honestly thought she might murder him and end up on a Forensic Files episode of her very own.

  In the classroom, she was still patient and relatively serene. Her voice was still soft and pleasant, her hands still gentle and kind on students’ shoulders, her smile still sweet and loving. Well, maybe not the smile so much. Sometimes students looked at her, and Jane could see in their expressions that her face did not match her warm voice.

  In fact, it was Jane’s mood acceleration in the checkout line at Glen’s that led them to first tell people about the baby. She and Duncan were doing the normal grocery shopping on Saturday morning, and Marie Henderson rang up their groceries without subtracting Jane’s coupon for yogurt, and Jane snapped, “Come on!”

  “You’ll have to excuse Jane, Marie,” Duncan said. “It’s hormones. She’s pregnant.”

  “What?” Marie pressed the cash register release so abruptly the drawer flew out and hit her in the hip. “On purpose?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Duncan said. “Due in February.”

  “Well.” Marie looked uncertain. “Congratulations.”

  “In fact, we’re thinking of naming the baby Glen,” Duncan said in an expansive voice, “seeing how we fell in love the second time right over there in frozen foods.”

  “What if it’s a girl?” Marie asked.

  “Glen works for a girl,” Duncan said. “If it’s twins, we’ll call them Glen and Glen.”

  Jane rolled her eyes. “It’s not twins.”

  They paid for their groceries and wheeled the shopping cart out to the parking lot. As soon as they were outside, Jane said, “I can’t believe you told Marie Henderson!”

  “I like Marie.” Duncan was unperturbed. “Besides, everyone’s going to know pretty soon.”

  “I like Marie, too,” Jane said. “I just didn’t want her to be the first person we told.”

  “Who did you want the first person to be?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Jane said. “My mother, I guess.”

  “Here you go.” Duncan handed her his cell phone. Reception had improved in Boyne City, and he had a cell phone now. She did, too, but hers was at home.

  “Call your mother right now, and it’ll be almost like we told her first. I’ll put the groceries in back.”

  Jane climbed into the passenger seat and dialed her mother’s number. “Hello, Mom.”

  “Why, hello, Jane,” her mother said. Clunk! went the sound of her recliner going back. “I’m just sitting here watching the news about the space shuttle launch.”

  “I have some news, too,” Jane said. “That’s why I’m calling.” Duncan slammed the hatchback shut and got in on the driver’s side. “I’m—I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Well, that certainly is news,” Jane’s mother said. The words were right, but the intonation was wrong, Jane felt. Not like other mothers. Her mother sounded as though Jane’s news was less impressive than NASA’s news. “When are you due?”

  “February twentieth.”

  “How is the pregnancy so far?”

  “Everything is going well,” Jane said. “I’m just tired all the time, and I have terrible heartburn.”

  “That means the baby’s going to be born with a full head of hair,” her mother said.

  “I’ve heard that, too—”

  “I hope it’s not born with fur,” her mother said in a thoughtful tone. “When I had you, there was another baby born at the hospital with hair all over its body. I think the hair fell out later on, but still, it must have been hard on the parents.”

  “Mom, that’s called lanugo,” Jane said, her voice rising. “And—”

  “I feel for Duncan, of course,” her mother interrupted calmly.

  Jane frowned. “What does that mean, you feel for him?”

  “Well, no man wants to become a father after fifty,” her mother said. “I know you probably felt your biological clock ticking, but—”

  “Duncan wants to be a father!” Jane said, nearly shouting. “The baby was his idea!”

  “Jane, I do hope you’re not having a child just to please him,” her mother replied. “Because that’s no recipe for happiness—”

  “I have to go now, Mom,” Jane said. “We’re about to go through a tunnel.”

  She pressed the end button and handed Duncan’s phone back to him. He slipped it into his shirt pocket and switched on the ignition. “No tunnels in Boyne City that I know of,” he said.

  Jane was breathing heavily. “I’m glad we told Marie first. Glad.”

  “Only tunnel I know of is the Detroit-Windsor one,” Duncan continued thoughtfully. “You want to go to Canada?”

  “No, of course not,” Jane said. “Let’s go home and tell Jimmy.”

  She didn’t mean they should tell Jimmy the second they got home, but that’s what they did. Jimmy came out of the house, squinting in the sunshine, to help them unload the groceries. Duncan opened the hatchback and Jimmy scooped up some rolls of paper towels. Duncan clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good news, Jim! We’re going to have a baby.”

  Jimmy froze. “Seriously?”

  “You bet.”

  Jimmy looked at Jane doubtfully, and Jane did her best to look pregnant, motherly.

  “You’re not teasing?” Always Jimmy seemed to worry that people were teasing him, a worry that could only come from a lifetime of having been teased and tricked and lied to. Honestly, people were such assholes. It made Jane want to wring humanity’s neck.

  “No teasing, Jimmy,” she said. “I really am going to have a baby. In a few months, you’ll be able to feel him or her kick.”

  Jimmy looked from her face to Duncan’s and back. “Will the baby be related to me?”

  Jane wasn’t prepared for that, although it made sense. Jimmy was alone in the world now; he wanted some family. She didn’t know how to answer, but Duncan said easily, “Of course the baby will be related to you. Our family will be a little bigger, that’s all. The baby will know you and love you just like we do.”

  “Hurray!” Jimmy shouted so suddenly that Jane jumped a little. He looked like he might throw the paper towels in the air. “Hurray for us!”

  Sometimes he said just the right thing.

  * * *

  —

  The worst thing about Jane’s obstetrician was not that his office was all the way on the far side of Petoskey. That was, in fact, partly why Jane chose him. She didn’t want to go to an obstetrician in Boyne City, where she might have taught one of the doctor’s children and Duncan would almost certainly have slept with a number of the doctor’s patients. The worst part was not that her obstetrician was named Dr. Skyberger and that Duncan immediately began calling him “Dr. Skywalker” and doing things like pointing to Jane’s stomach and saying, “I am your father!” in a Darth Vader voice, which made Jimmy laugh and slap his knee. (It was right about then that Jane began
actively hoping the baby was a girl.) It wasn’t even that Dr. Skywalker had the flowing beard and hot eyes of an insane revivalist preacher (though that took some getting used to), or that his receptionist turned out to be the sister of a former girlfriend of Duncan’s, or even that Duncan looked fondly nostalgic and said, “How is Denise? She still driving that old Mustang?”

  The worst thing was the other people in the waiting room. Very young girls accompanied by grim-faced mothers. Couples who wore sweatshirts reading hubby and wifey. A man who talked loudly on his cell phone the whole time: “Ask Doug. No, ask Arnie. Wait, didn’t we tell them Thursday? I should be back by one, one thirty at the latest. Put it on my desk.” What line of work was he in? How was it possible that Jane had to listen to him talk for a solid thirty minutes and still didn’t know? Another woman was accompanied by a man with the most unfortunate facial hair Jane had ever seen—a moustache no thicker than dental floss that started under his nose and continued down either side of his mouth to meet on his chin. It looked like someone had circled an area on his face with a marker and said, “This here is where your moustache and beard should go.” A heavily pregnant woman who settled herself into a chair and then stared at the wall in a fixed way that Jane found disturbing. A man and a woman, both dressed like corporate bankers, who proudly disdained speaking to each other. A red-eyed, puffy-faced woman who seemed to be crying her way through an entire pregnancy. A man with a military-short haircut who said to his wife, “I’m telling you right now, you better not go into labor on Super Bowl Sunday.”

  And then there were the couples whom Jane thought of as mutual-desperation couples. The couples you looked at and thought, Well, she’s homely but he’s nerdy or He’s bald but she’s so bossy or Her eyes are way too close together but he has that weak chin. It wasn’t nice to think these things but Jane couldn’t seem to help it. And of course, maybe it wasn’t even true. Maybe these men and women looked beyond the superficial to appreciate the depths of their partners’ kindness and decency, their humor and authenticity. (Jane didn’t believe that for a moment.) And what did people think when they saw her and Duncan? He’s so handsome but she scowls all the time or She’s pretty enough but he doesn’t look like the faithful type or She’s probably trying to trap him with this baby—