Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “You think you may be pregnant? Is not too late. It is five in one hundred who become pregnant once they are forty, and the Down’s, there is the Down’s, and the retardation…but we get the best doctors for that and of course help for you.”

  “I’m getting off the phone now.”

  “Aspetta, I am with Marcella at Berg-a-dorf’s: aubergine or crana-berry?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Towels. Yes, she has sheets they are a schifo blend, and no linens for the table, can you believe? Marcella cannot believe. Aubergine or crana-berry?” Cici uffs and then mock whispers:

  “You and Michael, you are still trying, sì?”

  “Thanks and hanging up now.”

  As Cheri pulls the phone away from her ear to hit End Call, she hears Cici prattling on. “Aspetta, cara, we need to discuss your big birtha-day. For the party, I am thinking—” Cheri pushes the button before she can hear what, exactly, Cici is thinking.

  For her entire sexually active life, Cheri worried about getting pregnant. When she was sixteen she tricked Cici into taking her to the gynecologist by saying it burned when she peed, then she asked the doctor to give her a diaphragm. He had shown her a plastic vagina, wearing it like a hand puppet as if she didn’t know her own anatomy. She wasn’t having sex with anyone in high school, but Taya was, and Cheri wanted to be prepared. She couldn’t have imagined that now she’d be worried about not getting pregnant.

  Michael asked about birth control on their first date. They’d met at Yale; he was a rangy director with cult status and packed film-studies classes, and she was a rising postdoctoral candidate twenty years his junior. They’d met at a screening of his famous exquisite corpse documentary, Disco, Doughnuts, and Dogma. After the Q&A, Michael wove through the crowd of genuine acolytes and poor undergrads there for the free booze and asked Cheri out for a drink. They spent the first part of the date wrapped up in each other’s words, and by the end, they’d shifted to mouths and as many body parts as they could possibly touch in public. She was on the pill, she’d told him. “Do you want kids?” he’d probed. “Not at this instant, just in general.”

  “You’re getting pretty personal pretty quickly.”

  “You know this is not just any first date, right?” He held eye contact. She knew.

  “Well, to be honest, I’ve never had the desire to have a baby and can’t see that changing. Guess you could say I’m not a kid person.”

  By the time Cheri was leaving her toothbrush on Michael’s sink, they’d agreed they weren’t kid people, group people, pet people, morning people, organized-religion people, suck-up-to-the-dean people, or joggers—though they didn’t agree on everything. If Michael had known Cheri was a gun-toting NRA member, he’d never have dated her. But by the time he found out about her past as a cop, he was in too deep. Despite a twenty-year age difference, they were similarly independent and valued the freedom to go anywhere without the burden of dependents. They were far more interesting than couples whose lives had been swallowed whole by their kids. The kind who let Legos colonize the coffee table and yelped, “Oh, don’t move that! It’s Jimmy’s Death Star. Isn’t it amazing?” Grown-ups who moaned about how they hadn’t seen a movie in a year and didn’t have time to F-U-C-K.

  But something happened in their marriage after the first five years of nonprocreative F-U-C-K-I-N-G. Was it their age difference, which didn’t seem to matter at first? Was it because her academic career was on the rise while his career stalled in endless revisions to an already-years-in-the-making documentary? Because Michael wasn’t earning any money and, unexpectedly, she had a large inheritance? She’d eschewed her parents’ world of privilege and hadn’t taken a penny from them since her junior year in college. She acted as if her trust fund didn’t exist. But maybe it reminded Michael of what he didn’t have. Whatever the cause of their estrangement, Cheri noticed Michael’s age more and sought his advice less; where they used to be selfish with their time together, they became more selfish with their time alone. Cheri knew that if they didn’t change something soon there would be nothing left to hold them together. She always hated it when her friends with kids felt the need to point out that having a child was the true experience of unconditional love. You’ll never get that with just you and Michael, they might as well have said. Maybe they needed to add not subtract in their equation. “And why would I want to do that?” was Michael’s reaction.

  As time passed, Cheri became certain of yes while Michael’s grasp on no loosened ever so slightly. As a self-described JuBu—New Age parlance for Jewish Buddhist—he tried to remain unattached to outcomes. Fine, she agreed, no birth control, no expectations. Let’s just see what happens.

  As soon as Cheri threw away her pill packet, things started to change. Whereas she had gotten used to inwardly recoiling from Michael’s advances—how he would graze her breast with his untrimmed nails while she was in bed grading papers or sidle lazily up to her first thing in the morning—his hand tracing the curve of her spine now felt strangely arousing. Was it the sense of purpose, the thrill and fear of the unknown, the potential to perform the ultimate act of creation? The more sex they had, the more they wanted. Intimacies that were the first victims of familiarity and had long been forsaken—like making out or looking into each other’s eyes—made their way back into the fold. They smoked weed together and watched porn. They were lovers again.

  A few months later, still feeling no reason for alarm that she hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, Cheri bought an ovulation kit. She was only thirty-seven. She had regular periods. There was plenty of time. Little did she know that once the sword of infertility was hanging over their heads, the same procreative drive that reconnected her and Michael would end up unbinding them further, pushing them back into their old, distancing habits.

  Cheri sighs. Conversations with her mother always exhaust her. An ambulance goes screaming by, followed by police cars. There must be an accident up ahead. She checks her watch. With this gridlock, it could take hours to reach Dr. Morrison’s office. She pulls a thick sheaf of papers from her briefcase. They’re the donor-egg profiles she’d been given at her last appointment. Each profile is several pages long and contains details on everything from the donor’s ethnic background to favorite music to body type. Donor 157 is getting her master’s in music theory. Her parents breed dressage horses. She likes nature and can hear stones sing. Number 258: Harvard grad, diplomat brat, pole-vaulter, likes dogs, allergic to cats, no cavities. Where’s the box for daddy issues, bulimia, low self-esteem, leaning toward nymphomania, Cheri wonders. Do any of these girls have a sardonic sense of humor that would remotely resemble her own? Or will it be a repeat of the Sesame Street “one of these things is not like the other” dilemma she experienced with Cici and Sol? Was it so wrong to want to see herself in her child? To want her child to have the automatic sense of belonging that Cheri never felt? She’d like to be able to say that having a child is more important than having a child of her own. But maybe she’s not that good of a person.

  Cheri looks up. The expressway is a parking lot. Her chances of making it to Dr. Morrison’s office on time are roughly equal to the one-in-a-million chance of Michael’s elderly sperm reaching one of her middle-aged eggs. She pictures Number 157’s fresh young egg, winking: Come get me.

  Not today. She doesn’t have the stomach for it.

  Merrily We Roll Around

  Lincoln Park is the whitest place in the world. That was her reaction when she and Michael started house-hunting. Leafy streets, safe park, upscale stores; far too vanilla. Until they saw the old Victorian house with purple shutters and odd angles, sloping hard oak floors and hidden compartments installed during Prohibition. It was long on charm and short on practicality—perfect for them.

  Michael is not in the kitchen making dinner. Cheri crosses the backyard to the guesthouse that is his editing bay and office; the plaque she made to look like a ship’s insig
nia reading HMS Bay hangs over the door. “Michael?” His office smells of weed and nag champa. It’s a delicate ecosystem and only he knows the correct balance. Everything looks randomly placed, but if she were to move something, he’d have an aneurysm. He’s got a framed Spanish titled version of his cult classic Disco, Doughnuts, and Dogma over his “napping bed.” On the bed are half-finished New York Times crossword puzzles and a beading tray. Beading is Michael’s latest distraction. Cheri thinks of it as craft rehab for artists who have fallen and can’t get up. It’s no worse than his previous distractions: building shelves that tore up a wall in the process, making Moroccan lamb ten different ways, or trying to play Eric Johnson licks on his old Stratocaster.

  Michael’s computer screen is filled with beetles burrowing their way into glutinous dung, rolling around until they gradually become a living lozenge of excrement. He must have forgotten to hit Pause. Cheri doesn’t come in here often, and she’s never seen this footage before. How it figures into his documentary on drug addiction called One World Under the Influence or Everybody Must Get Stoned—the title teeters between the two—is anyone’s guess. She can’t help thinking that Michael’s like the beetle, rolling around and around with his obsessive fiddling, revising and reshooting.

  “Hey, babe. You’re in my chair,” Michael says, coming up behind her.

  He’s still wearing the same sweatpants and shirt he rolled out of bed in. “Your mother called,” he says, motioning for her to get up. “On my line. Can you tell her for the millionth time not to do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, then. Back to work.” He hunkers down over his editing software. Tap-tap-tap. The beetles rewind. It takes several seconds for them to become denuded of dung. With his back still to her, Michael says, “There’s nothing for dinner. My stomach’s been acting up so I’m not hungry. You’ll have to forage.”

  “I saw that. So…how was your day?” she ventures.

  “Like any other. I worked. Oh, and your mother was putting a bug in my ear about your fortieth. Months away but no time like the present to plan for something I’m sure you won’t want.”

  “I can’t even start with that.”

  “Forewarned is forearmed. Maybe you can head her off at the pass. Listen, I have to get back to this—is there something you need?”

  “I guess I just wanted to see you.”

  “Well, here I am.” Cheri notices a small Chinese apothecary cabinet next to Michael’s desk. Its drawers have Post-its stuck on them with labels like Doesn’t hit you over the head, just lowers the ceiling; Don’t take sitting down.

  “Is this a joke?” Cheri asks.

  “Research. Also, fans send me their favorite stuff. I’m finally cataloging it.”

  “Fans send you drugs?”

  “Yes, fans. Also biochemists, aborigines, people I’ve interviewed; that’s what the film’s about.”

  “And you’re keeping all this in the house?” Cheri thinks: How many counts of possession?

  “Just a few samples. A lot are classified as plants and medicinal. Don’t look at me like I’m Timothy Leary.”

  “Doesn’t look like a few samples…”

  “I’m trying to work. Did you come in here just to bust my balls, or did you want something?”

  “I just had a hard day.”

  “Well, why didn’t you start by saying that instead of taking it out on me?” Michael says, not bothering to stop clicking and pausing the beetle footage. “Get some rest, babe. I’ll be up later.”

  Cheri has cereal and two large tumblers of scotch for dinner as she grades the last of her students’ papers. She doesn’t have a home office per se; she rotates between a table in the bedroom and her old college desk squeezed into the corner of the den. She notices a necklace in Jamaican colors hanging over her desk lamp. Encroachment. Is Michael going to start hanging them everywhere, like the milagro bean trees? She looks out the window at the corona of the John Hancock Center, lit against the ink palette of sky. It’s a sight she’s seen hundreds of times before, unremarkable. Except when she imagines it seen through the eyes of her would-be child. She used to do that last spring when Oz fair was in full swing in the park, the sailboats along Lake Michigan making their lazy circles. She yearns to experience that sense of childlike wonder, when everything seems possible and the world has yet to teach you otherwise.

  When she goes upstairs to the bedroom, she finds Michael already asleep. He’s on his side, pillows flanking him for his back. She crawls underneath the covers. Her mind pivots from the debacle with Samuelson to the umpteenth fight with Michael. She wants, craves, another cigarette. She’s had fewer than ten today. She goes back downstairs to the kitchen, where she exhales smoke out the window, wishing she could expel the heaviness of the day.

  She gets back on her side of the bed and tries to remember the last time they had sex. Weeks ago, early, quickly, lazy spoon position; she was in the fertile zone and he had a morning hard-on. In their semiconscious states, there was less chance of them fighting. Sometimes she’d use her imagination: a faceless man in a dark alley grabs her and presses her up against the wall, his hand reaching into her blouse, pinching her nipples while he whispers what he’s going to do to her. That’s what she thinks of now as she breaks through the pillow barricade and curls against Michael, pressing her hips against his back, her foot sliding against the arch of his foot. He jerks away. “I’m tired, Cheri,” he mumbles. “Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?” Lately Michael’s complaints of tiredness feel near constant. The other night, after he could barely summon the energy to get undressed for bed, he had rolled over and asked Cheri if she thought there was something wrong with him. Laziness, she had thought to herself. She crabs over to her side of the bed and stares at the ceiling. Hating him.

  “Do you want to talk,” she says, not really meaning it.

  “I’m not a machine; I can’t fuck on command. Wait a minute, we were taking a break—you can’t even be ovulating yet.”

  “It doesn’t have to only happen when I’m ovulating.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You are telling me this?” After a while he adds: “Did you even notice the necklace?”

  “The one hanging off the lamp by my desk? That was for me?”

  “No, it’s for Elijah. What do you think?”

  Cheri thought it looked like something you’d buy from a Jamaican guy at the airport. “It’s cute, thanks.”

  “Cute? That’s real buffalo horn,” he says gruffly, pushing the covers off and swinging his feet over the side of the bed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to take a piss if you don’t mind and maybe a shit because my stomach’s been messed up. And then I’m going to meditate.”

  Cheri listens to the on and off burst of his pee, the dribble at the end. She listens to the opening and half closing of the closet door, the rustle of fabric against carpet, the small crack of his neck as he settles on his cushion. He’s perfected the art of using meditation as a passive-aggressive weapon. He belches, yawks at the back of his throat. Sounds that make Cheri feel like she’s living with an old penguin named Milton. Without opening her eyes she knows he’s in the lotus position on the floor by his side of the bed. She hears Michael’s loud, heavy exhale, the sharp rise of his inhale. Namaste. She turns away and puts her pillow over her head until all she can hear is the hum of her own frustration.

  School’s Out for Summer

  It’s only the beginning of June and Cheri can already feel the humidity socking in. She’s sitting outside at the patio table, darting between news sites on her laptop and smoking. So much for quitting. Or being pregnant. Or, much to the dismay of her editor, making progress on her new book. Every time she tried to focus on ancient burial customs, her mind, like a dog that sees a squirrel, would turn to Iraq. True to form, gauging the chances of war in Iraq is squirrelly.

  “There’s nothing like the smell of impending war in the morning. Bush talking about
preemptive strikes? Or is that just the carcinogens you’re inhaling?” Michael has emerged from the kitchen with his usual breakfast of oat-bran flakes and soy milk. “Don’t tell me the news is any different from what it was an hour ago.”

  “It’s always different on Al Jazeera.” She doesn’t know what’s more annoying, his crunching or his riding her about her self-interest in the fate of Iraq.

  “Different perspective, same prediction. What are the odds now of an invasion—fifty-fifty by the end of the year? Who cares that thousands of young men could lose their lives in a trumped-up war? It’s what will happen to the artifacts—that’s the question.”

  She’s not taking that bait.

  “If you look away, it’s not like you’ll be able to get into Iraq any faster,” he says, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Hard as it is for you to accept, maybe a little downtime wouldn’t be the worst thing. I can’t get away but maybe you could do something with your mother so she gets off your birthday bandwagon?”

  Cheri gives a vague grunt and doesn’t look up until she knows he’s crossing the weedy, mess of a yard, heading toward HMS Bay. Even after his longtime producer Bertrand told him they’d lost their distribution deal, Michael continued to carry himself with artistic entitlement; he’s indignant if anyone questions all the time he’s taking with this documentary. Bertrand has always reminded Cheri a bit of Father Christmas; nobody had seen his chin since the sixties. It’s covered with a full but always neatly trimmed white beard. He’s put up with Michael’s ego far more patiently than she has, and for much longer. Cheri watches Michael tramping up the stairs to his office. She knows better than to ask when he’ll be finished. All the F-words are hot buttons: film, finances, fucking, and, the worst—failure.

  Cheri was not supposed to be at home, staring down the barrel of a hot, muggy summer in Chicago without a project. Ordinarily, summers without teaching obligations were the best perk of her job. They allowed her to dive deeply into research, to write and devise new curricula or to travel to the Middle East as a visiting scholar. She lived for those transcendent moments when she was lost in her translations, ordering and reordering ancient symbols, unable to glimpse their story until they suddenly clicked into place, revealing a new custom, law, or, as was the case with the first tablet she helped Peter Martins translate, the world’s oldest recipe for beer. “We are here to commune with ancient ghosts,” he told her, “we liberate them so others can hear.”