Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  A few Tuesdays into this enterprise, Jason Pakarinen leaves the enclosure around the basketball court and saunters up the concrete path that leads to my rock. I think he will turn off at any minute because Jason Pakarinen couldn’t possibly be coming to talk to me. I am not disgusted by boys like some of my friends. I am, in fact, madly in love with Jason Pakarinen. His mother and my mother are quite friendly, but this has never stopped him from pretending I don’t exist. The fact that Jason Pakarinen even has a mother is bewildering to me. What does one make a perfect boy for dinner? How does one tell him what to do? What does he dream of at night?

  This is really happening. Jason Pakarinen is headed straight toward me. My clientele is expanding in marvelous directions.

  “Yeah,” Jason Pakarinen begins.

  This speaks to the intimate secrets he’s about to reveal—he greets me as if we’ve been conversing for hours.

  “Yeah, I have a problem,” he says.

  Dear God, I think, has he prepared a speech?

  “Yes?” I ask, fluttering my nascent eyelashes. “How can I help you, Jason?”

  “Yeah, there’s this really annoying girl giving advice on a rock.”

  To his credit, this is a pretty sick burn for a fourth grader. I make a mask of my face as if unaffected, even though I am desperate to dispose of my own body.

  “What do you think I should do about it?” he asks, roundhouse kicking my feelings.

  “Shut up,” I tell him.

  I mean it as a jab but it comes out as more of a guess. Shut up and boner occupy the deepest crevices of my insult bag. I have to dust them off before deploying them.

  Jason Pakarinen laughs—cackles, really—and walks away. I watch him intently to see if he’s returning to his friends. Much to my relief, he’s headed for the boys’ room. Alas, this means that my humiliation was but an errand for him. He had to pee the whole time.

  *

  Twenty years later, I am standing behind a police barricade on Fifth Avenue because it’s the Gay Pride parade and all parades are awful at the molecular level, even ones for clean air and kittens. I am with my boyfriend and we are waiting for our turn to cross the street. We’ve been standing here for so long, I can’t remember a time before we were standing here. There’s so much cheering and stimulation that it takes an adult Jason Pakarinen several attempts at calling my name before I hear it.

  I turn around to see that he, too, is waiting to cross the street. Because of social media and life in general, I recognize him as instantly as he recognizes me. He’s wearing fancy spandex and leaning on a sleek bicycle that looks like a paper clip that fell from heaven. If there were any justice in the world, Jason Pakarinen would be drinking in an Applebee’s in the middle of the day with his ass crack showing. But there is no justice in this world. Jason Pakarinen went on to be well-liked throughout high school and graduated from Stanford and a bunch of other schools and is currently a physicist in London.

  Who let him back into the country?

  We embrace. Because apparently, being an adult is about the same thing as being in fourth grade: embracing your sworn enemy. I admonish myself for being flattered that Jason Pakarinen is so happy to see me. I introduce him to my boyfriend and they chat about total nonsense. Like the pros and cons of dropping off one’s laundry. I am gobsmacked by how they can have such a dull conversation, as if the universe didn’t just collapse on itself. But it does make me happy to imagine a little girl such as myself, wondering what my boyfriend ate for dinner when he was a kid, knowing he was not a cruel child.

  When a cop moves the barricade aside, we all hustle through together. Jason Pakarinen tells us all about his life, about how wonderful London is and how he’s just gut renovated a house for himself and his wife, a pickle monger who’s pregnant with twins.

  “They’re mine,” he says, making a clever joke.

  I tell him about a novel I just bought, holding up the bag as proof, as if purchasing a novel trumps everything he has just said. My boyfriend, who never knew Jason Pakarinen, the boy-god, looks at me like I’ve been drinking. At the end of the block, I assume Jason Pakarinen and his bike will cut into the park, but he keeps following us, wheeling and talking.

  “I’m so glad I ran into you,” he says.

  Again, I try not to be flattered. Finally, as we reach another corner, he shows his cards. His mother heard from my mother that I used to work at a publishing house.

  “This is true,” I tell him.

  “My wife is putting together a book proposal,” he says.

  “On pickle mongering?” asks my boyfriend.

  “She’s really popular in the UK,” explains Jason Pakarinen. “I wonder if I can ask you to look at the book proposal.”

  “I worked in publicity,” I explain. “I didn’t really see proposals.”

  I have seen hundreds upon hundreds of book proposals.

  “Oh,” says Jason Pakarinen.

  I can tell he’s about to give it another go. You don’t get into Stanford by giving up that easy!

  “Well,” he says, “maybe if you just had any advice for her … I’ll e-mail you.”

  “I rarely check it,” I say. “Anyway, it was nice to bump into you!”

  I give him a hug so brief it could pass for a breeze, grab my boyfriend, and pull him away. In my peripheral vision, I see Jason Pakarinen looking confused, as if he has overstepped his bounds. And maybe he has. I don’t ask people I haven’t seen in twenty years for favors. I don’t go up to doctors at parties and ask them to look at a weird bump on my thumb, and I certainly don’t say, “Wait here, I want you to look at my wife’s weird thumb bump.” As far as Jason Pakarinen is concerned, my advice-giving days are over. Shop’s closed. But perhaps this doesn’t justify physically running from this blast from the past as if a shard had hit me in the eye.

  “Well, that was a little on the bitchy side,” my boyfriend decides.

  I know it was. But I give him a dirty look for saying it first. He is undeterred, waiting for an explanation for this incongruous behavior. What he does not realize is that it’s not incongruous—it’s overdue. What he does not realize is that Jason Pakarinen is responsible for a fragment of the woman he loves, a fragment so small no one would notice it missing but me. I look over my shoulder to make sure that Jason Pakarinen has disappeared. Then I ask him who his favorite Peanuts character was and cross my fingers for the right answer.

  The Doctor Is a Woman

  I used to subscribe to a magazine that came with a postcard crammed in the spine of each issue. On one side of the postcard was a famous work of art, on the other a thin line, splitting the negative space. Standard postcard protocol. I liked the postcards mostly because I like to avoid clutter and they gave me something to throw out. Except for one. A photograph of a tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, by the British artist Tracey Emin. Inside a camping tent, Emin had stitched the names of anyone she’d ever shared a bed with, from friends to relatives to lovers. The tent’s reproduction on a postcard whittled its meaning down to the provocative title, but that was enough to save it from the trash. I put it on the mantel of my defunct fireplace, where I kept other precious keepsakes, like crumpled receipts, votive candles, and free-floating sticks of gum.

  One night, as I was making dinner, I smelled something burning in the living room. Somehow the postcard had migrated near one of the lit candles and begun to smoke. I rushed to blow it out, thinking only of the vulnerability of my own belongings. But the next morning, on the cover of the arts section of The New York Times, was the headline London Warehouse Fire Destroys Artworks. At 2 a.m., right around when my postcard went up in flames in New York, a fire blew through a warehouse in east London, destroying millions of dollars’ worth of artwork, including the tent. I couldn’t believe my eyes but then, in an instant, I could. An instant is how long it takes to convince yourself of anything—that a banging shutter is an intruder, that you could live off juice for a week, or, in my case, that I was a fu
ll-blown witch.

  In the wake of my latent powers, I looked into seeing a psychic. Game recognize game and all that. I had never been to a psychic before. I figured if I want to throw my money away, I’d be better served buying six-dollar lattes. Or curling up cash into little tubes and shoving it down the drain. As far as I’m concerned, the psychics on the sidewalk are hucksters: the ones with the neon signs tell you what you want to hear and the good ones tell you what you already know. You have a fraught relationship with your mother. Oh, do I? Go on. They’re also notoriously poor marketers. Once I walked past a door that read PSYCHIC WITHIN, which I took to mean “within me” and kept walking.

  Eventually, I settled on a psychic who came recommended by a rational friend whose only point of earthly disconnect was a nonsensical aversion to gluten. She sold me on this guy using the one guaranteed pressure point for any skeptic: our own skepticism. How could I be sure that my conception of the universe is the absolute one? I could not. Technically, this fellow was an “intuitor,” which I found less hubristic than “psychic.” And he had an actual office, which was encouraging. The office was located in a building in the Flatiron, behind a wavy glass door. Gold lettering on the door read PLEASE KNOCK. This was less encouraging. What kind of intuitor requires a knock at the door?

  He welcomed me inside, sat me down, dumped a shot of ginger into his tea, and informed me that I would have many children.

  “You will have many children,” he said.

  “Don’t you need to see my palm first or something?”

  He seemed insulted. He doesn’t come to my house and tell me how to turn the computer on.

  “No,” he said, shuffling a pack of tarot cards.

  When I told him about the postcard, he was unimpressed. For me, it was one of the crazier things that had ever happened, one of the few life events that did not fall under the purview of coincidence. I was like one of those out-of-control mutant school brats. For him, it was as if I wanted a parade for flushing the toilet.

  “You are not a destroyer,” he assured me, trying to rid me of an idea that had never occurred to me. “Energy is like a giant sweater. All you did was tug on a thread. And by doing that, you have created something.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “A five-alarm fire.”

  “No,” he said, “not that.”

  There were tiny bells sewn into the seam of his head scarf. They chimed as he shook his head back and forth.

  “You have created the children.”

  “What children?”

  “Yours.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours.”

  I looked over my shoulder.

  “The children inside you,” he clarified, pointing at my belly.

  I did not sign up for this Ray Bradbury shit. It’s one thing to predict the future, it’s quite another to alter its course. How could I possibly have made children, nay, “many children,” simply by coming here? If this were feasible, he should change his business cards and become the richest man in America.

  “I don’t think about children,” I said.

  This came out chillier than I meant it, like I was snubbing a street canvasser. It’s not that I was against children. I was not one of those women who felt the need to stress how much she never played with baby dolls as a child. As if the budding embracement of the power to procreate is somehow shameful. You’re not one of those girls. Not you. It’s just that I was still in my early twenties and against participating in a version of my life in which I wound up crediting a stranger for calling my motherhood in advance.

  I explained that, as a literate female, it’s difficult to control the flow of stories debating the merits of motherhood, pumping women full of anxiety and presumptive regret, yammering on about the inflexibility of biological time if you want to have kids and the inflexibility of actual time after you have them. As if it’s entirely in your hands anyway, which it’s not if you’re single or poor or both. So I had opted to turn the faucet off entirely. Even the articles about how one is permitted to forgo babies only added to the pressure. One or two in isolation, okay. I might have read those. I’m sure they’re very good. But there were just too many. The more they screamed about a woman’s right to make her own stigma-free decision, the more they kept the topic in circulation. So, at the risk of remaining ill-informed about my own desires and thus engaging in the kind of self-suppression that has haunted women for centuries, I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing. Sometimes it worked. Other times I saw a giant uterus with fallopian tube arms, terrorizing the city, ripping the crown off the Statue of Liberty before sinking into the Hudson.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the intuitor said. “The children think about you.”

  Okay, I thought. Good for them. Can we get back to me being a witch?

  “They’re coming,” he stressed.

  I told him I didn’t want the kind of children who show up to places uninvited. He took a sip of his tea, smiling at me as if I, too, had taken a sip of the tea. Then he shouted:

  “And I’m sure your tent didn’t want to be set on fire but—poof!”

  For this, I gave him sixty dollars and left the building. I briefly wondered if I should tip him. Does one tip an intuitor? A retroactive tipping system might be the way to go. Tell you what: Turns out I get eaten by that anaconda, there’s a ten-dollar bill in an envelope with your name on it. I waited on line at the coffee shop downstairs. Where was this army of babies going to come from? I had no plans to get artificially inseminated, was bothered by the mere sound of it, and, even if I did, I wasn’t going to start that afternoon. At the time, I didn’t have a boyfriend or even a guy friend whom I could see as the father of my child, if only he’d take off his glasses and undo his ponytail. The only thing I was expecting was a six-dollar latte.

  *

  Most children are okay once you get to know them. They’re like your flakiest, least employable friend who sleeps through brunch, makes terrible art, and name-drops characters you’ve never heard of. They’re also easy to beat at tag. Personally, I like my child friends to be at least seven years old, as there is little difference between what amuses me and what amuses a seven-year-old. But the idea of pushing a whole person through my major organs has always been simultaneously too abstract and too horrible. As someone who has met pregnant women, I can tell you that babies pound your bladder into a pancake and put your stomach level with your heart. This would be funny if women were men because the joke with men is that the way to their hearts is through their stomachs. But women are not men.

  Deep down, I thought it was a moot point anyway. I secretly thought that if I ever wanted to become pregnant, a doctor would tell me that my uterus was not broken, but absentee. There’s just a bunch of insulation foam where a uterus might go. The one time I had reason to purchase a pregnancy test, I peed on the stick and waited for one blue line or two blue lines. When the timer went off, I went to check on the stick. The window was blank. Like a Magic 8 Ball without the magic. I consulted the box. “Blank” was not an option. I tried again with a second stick. Same deal. So I called my mother, who is generally useless on such matters but had recently knocked it out of the park after I lamented that a guy I was dating had never heard of Gloria Steinem.

  “Eh,” she had said, “find out if his mother doesn’t know who she is. Then you’re really screwed.”

  I thought perhaps this comment had ushered in a new era of wisdom. I was mistaken.

  “This is a good thing,” she assured me about the test. “Clearly, you’re not pregnant!”

  “I’m not ‘not pregnant,’” I said. “I’m nothing.”

  “Which would you rather be?” she asked. “Pregnant or nothing?”

  Those were my options? For so much of history, to not be pregnant was to be nothing. And while we have mostly sloughed off such beliefs, some animal part of me was speaking up, making a strong case for “pregnant.” Another minute passed before a solitary blue line appeared in the window. I
sighed, relieved. But we will never know who was the remedial one, me or the stick.

  *

  As I got older, I was surprised to find it was not my fellow women who were pressuring me to have a baby or even to have an opinion. You’d think a group of people who dress for one another would also have babies for one another. Not so. While I’m acquainted with a few status moms who believe what the world really needs is more Americans, and who ask, “What are you waiting for?” as if I have—whoops!—lost track of time, none of my actual girlfriends pressed the topic. They knew better. As for the question of immortality, of pushing my bloodline into the future, well, this is not the primary preoccupation of my gender.

  Yet just about every guy I dated assumed that children were at the forefront of my brain. They became increasingly vocal about this, ridding me of my need to ignore the mountain of trend pieces—they brought the mountain to me. One guy was forever sniffing out my DNA-hustling agenda. He shoehorned the topic into conversations about guacamole. You ever try to put toothpicks through an avocado pit? If only that’s how babies were made! His lack of verbal agility hit rock bottom as we lay on the beach one summer, chatting with our chins resting on our fists. I asked him if my back was getting red and he asked me what I would do if I got pregnant.

  “What are you going to do if you go bald?” I shot back.

  “That’s totally different,” he said.

  “Biologically,” I agreed, “not topically.”

  By this time, I was thirty-four. I told him that I wasn’t sure what I would do. Because I wasn’t. Furthermore, I resented what I perceived to be the weaponization of my own vulnerability for the purposes of this conversation. I could tell it would have been preferable if I had sprung to my feet and drawn ABORTIONS 4EVA in the sand. Looking back, it’s clear that he was building a case for himself, a verbal paper trail in which the reason it didn’t work out with us was because I was in a hurry to procreate. When the truth was he just wasn’t sure he wanted to have kids with me. Which was fair. I wasn’t sure I wanted kids with me either.