The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  Is a father family, if you hated him? If he’s dead?

  Now, it’s just her and Dan, and maybe not even that. Elise has a shocking urge to take Tom’s hand and clutch it in her own.

  ‘Please don’t leave me.’ She hears a voice, a man’s voice. Real, unreal, who can tell?

  ‘Please don’t leave,’ the man says.

  ‘Elise,’ he says, Tom says, here, now, in the clinic. ‘The doctor’s ready.’

  The doctor is a small dark-haired man with round silver glasses and a firm handshake. He takes her blood pressure, her temperature, looks into her eyes and ears. Takes a vial of blood from her arm for analysis.

  ‘I’ll give you a call tomorrow,’ he says, is all he can say. ‘I really can’t see anything wrong at this stage, but I want to see how your bloods come out. Your iron might be low. Or—’ he pauses to type a line into his computer ‘—it might just be dehydration. Take it easy for now. Go to sleep early, and hydrate.’

  Elise thanks him, signs her form at the front, but she isn’t ready to go back to the lab just yet. She sends Tom off without her—promising to hitch a ride later—and wanders the quiet town on her own. It’s late afternoon, and she watches the trees for savanna gliders, watches the underbrush for bandicoots, watches all the houses she will never live in. Plastic toys scattered across tropical, overgrown gardens. Water hangs in the air, humid like Iowa summers.

  She turns into the cool of a small arcade, and sees her there—a woman with her own face but younger and taller, with thick blonde hair piled above, wound up with rope and flowers, thick strands spilling all over like snakes. Stronger than her own ever was. Words curl up her arms, words Elise feels she should know already but doesn’t, and cannot read from so far away.

  She wants to read them.

  Be invited to read them.

  The woman’s belly protrudes through her sundress, a glowing and pregnant belly. How fluidly she moves, this woman, how easily and gracefully despite the bulk of her, her offset weight, and the sweep of her long dress over her boots. So many laces on the boots, like a corset over her calves.

  How does she lace them?

  Unlace them?

  Elise is compelled to watch the woman, follow her, find out more about her, who she is and what she loves. (What kind of mother she will be.) How she moves like this, like warm and luscious sex, even now, even when her body is not (just) her own.

  They walk together, one woman ahead and the other, unseen, behind, through the arcade. Browsing a rack of cheap t-shirts, a shelf of second-hand books. Elise follows the woman into the chemist, and marks in her mind what the woman picks up and puts back down, a woman like that, who might slip something into her bag and leave, Elise imagines,

  who might take something in her delicate hands, and look around, and catch Elise’s eyes and smile.

  And do it. Slip it right into her bag. A sunscreen, a lip balm, a slim nail file.

  Elise wishes she would do it, for only her to see. A thing to share between sisters, or friends, between younger and older, for trust. Elise imagines that, after, she might confront the woman in the alley behind the arcade, push her up against the brick facade and lean into her belly. Feel the near-grown baby kick hiccup shift between them, put her mouth on the woman’s mouth and take everything back.

  As her own.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says the woman, and Elise is shocked back into the shampoo aisle. She is holding a bottle of something she doesn’t need and can’t remember picking up.

  ‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ says the woman. The words on her arms seem to move, alive like insects. ‘But I wondered if you’d like to know the sex.’

  Elise swallows. Is there any way to fix this? She smiles at the woman. ‘You look beautiful. I was admiring your—belly. I’m sorry.’ So awkward. Deep breath. ‘Yes,’ she says, hoping to sound friendly. Amiable. ‘I would love to know the sex of your baby.’

  The woman smiles. ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘Not my baby. Yours.’ She reaches out her long smooth arm and touches Elise’s own belly, gently, with her fingertips. ‘I have a gift for these things. Even before you’re supposed to know, I know it.’

  But I’m not pregnant, Elise wants to say. I can’t be.

  Can I?

  ‘So do you want to know?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Elise. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s a girl,’ says the woman. ‘And she’ll have his freckles.’

  The woman kisses her then, on the cheek, and glides away. Elise watches her go, cannot (this time) follow. The idea, the impossibility, unbalances her, so soon after William, just one night with Dan. But it feels true, and real.

  In the public toilets at the end of the arcade, she confirms it.

  Two pink lines, again.

  All over again.

  The light outside grows dim, and the fluorescent overhead clicks on, flickers, buzzes into artificial brightness. Elise feels herself moving away from Groote Eylandt, the north, the field, and back to the real world. All of today so startlingly about the real world. She can’t stay, not now. She needs Dan, but can’t tell him. Her stomach coils around itself, around

  not-William

  but an improbable other.

  part four

  chapter 19

  She tells no one that she’s back in town, except for her mentor, Meredith Percy, head of Biology, whom she schedules to meet straight away. She won’t tell Percy of course, can’t tell her of course, but needs solid ground to stand on, a plan for the year ahead that is at least, in part, her own. A way to redirect her mind, now and then, from her uterus.

  Elise arrives early, and Percy is not yet waiting, is talking, in fact, with someone behind the closed door of her inner office. Elise sits in the fabric egg chair in the small alcove outside it. She considers the frosted-glass door, the voices beyond. She cannot see shapes or shadows. The glass absorbs just enough light from either side to seem, at first, more transparent than it is. Elise has never understood the politics of this place, always shifting, even here, in a department full of scientists, where things ought to be straightforward and logical,

  scientific.

  After ten minutes or so, the voices move closer to the door. A masculine laugh. The door swings open and her colleague Peter van den Berg emerges, smiling, with Meredith Percy behind him.

  ‘… you more so than the rest,’ Percy is saying to him, red-framed glasses perched on her forehead, hand on the open door, and Elise feels she should have listened more closely, through this door, but also through every door, along every corridor, and in every meeting in her entire career leading to this one.

  ‘Thanks, Meredith,’ says Peter and his eyes widen on Elise. They are the eyes of a deer. ‘You’re back!’ he says, moves past her quickly.

  Percy is already settling into her chair when Elise enters the office. It is a wide, queenly, mahogany desk.

  ‘Please close the door,’ she says. She folds her hands in front of her. ‘Elise. I am so sorry about your loss. How are you?’

  And Elise senses that she really is sorry, but that to tell her the truth would be extravagant. And now? What is the truth of now, anyway? Elise feels she might burst with fear.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she says. ‘It was good to get back into the field, spend some time with animals instead of spreadsheets.’

  ‘I’m going to push back your annual appraisal,’ says Percy. ‘We’ll do it towards the end of the year. But I want to talk through your progress today. I don’t want to see you fall behind.’

  What if, Elise wants to say, I have a baby at the end of the year?

  What if I don’t?

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, and hopes she sounds grateful.

  ‘Teaching and learning,’ says Percy.

  Elise leans in. ‘I’d actually like to speak to you about that. Since I’m back now.’ She pauses. ‘Well, since I’ll be here, I’d like to teach into BIOL 209 in the spring, and build towards coordinating it.’

  The course is Reproduc
tion, a keystone of the school, and the coordinator is retiring in a year. Elise knows the timing isn’t ideal, but she needs to become indispensable. She needs security to succeed, a continuing appointment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elise.’ Percy swivels to her computer and clicks open a tab. ‘I’ve given it to Peter to run, though he might have some lectures for you.’

  ‘But Peter doesn’t specialise in reproduction.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t.’

  Elise sits back again, and suppresses a wave of nausea.

  ‘Look,’ says Percy, ‘just keep teaching what you teach, and you’ll be fine. We need to make sure you have enough time to recover.’ She scrolls through the page on her computer. ‘What I’d like to talk about is research. Building your portfolio. As I said, I don’t want to see you fall behind.’

  How many times does she have to say it?

  ‘I have an idea about that,’ says Elise. ‘Have you heard of the male gaze? It’s a concept used to highlight the influence of men on art and film—the voyeurism, the objectification and perceived passivity of women. How men see women has shaped these fields, and I have no doubt they’ve shaped science, too. I want to write a book about how we run the show, use behaviour and physiology to control reproduction. Females, I mean. Not us specifically.’

  She smiles, awkwardly, could go on, but pauses. There is something in the other woman’s face that stops her.

  Percy sighs. ‘I’ll be honest, Elise—I don’t believe a book is worth your time, not at this stage of your career.’ She leans back in her chair, hands along the rail sides of it. ‘And certainly not a book about feminism.’

  ‘But it’s not a book about feminism,’ Elise says, face flushed. ‘It’s about science. How men have manipulated—and continue to manipulate—the theories and discovery and interpretation of reproductive biology. I’ve seen it hundreds of times in the sperm literature, and what I’m saying here is that it’s a bigger problem than just sperm. It’s about women and knowledge and a broken system.’

  ‘I understand, I really do.’

  Percy leans in, elbows on desk.

  ‘You know as well as I do that women have to work harder for everything—and even then, there’s no guarantee. But there’s a pretty clear formula if you want to succeed, and one thing you don’t do is make ripples. You build a name for yourself so infallible people hear the word marsupial and think of you, or sperm and think of you.’ She smiles. ‘Well, you know what I mean. That’s what a career is. And I’m just giving you my advice. Of course I can’t stop you if you want to write this book, but it’s not going to make you any friends, that’s for sure, and it’s definitely time you could be spending writing papers or grants. It’s not what you need for your career right now.’ She leans back again, pulls her glasses off. ‘Just do the work. That’s my advice. You need grant support, and top-tier papers. You just can’t compete without them.’

  Of course, Elise has always known this particular formula for success: where a paper is published, and when in a career, and which author in the list of them, and how many citations. But just doing the work has never been enough, not in the academic career track or in her own mind.

  I love science, she wants to say, but I love ideas more than politics.

  I’m tired of closed doors, rumours, she wants to say, I’m tired of everyone telling me I shouldn’t have a family or I shouldn’t write a book, that I need to focus, concentrate, put my fucking blinders on and do the kind of science that Nature wants, or Science, or PNAS.

  Fuck you, she wants to say. Fuck all of this.

  But instead she says, ‘I know.’

  And Professor Meredith Percy, head of department and sought-after mentor, smiles softly. ‘You’ve already missed all the grants this year—no,’ she waves her hand before Elise can interrupt, ‘you wouldn’t have been ready anyway. But if you seriously want an academic position anywhere, you need a grant in the next round, and that means an important project, preliminary data, and some big papers before then. Use this time you have wisely, make the most of it.’

  This. Time. You. Have.

  Meredith Percy does not have children. Does not need to have it all at once.

  Elise does not turn on the lights in the lab, does not answer the door when Vair knocks gently, does not move breathe think until the other woman goes. And then Elise returns to her work, the pressure and pull of stitches in skin, needlepoint in a feathered canvas. She tries to keep the loops small and tight so that they won’t be seen when it’s done, and the sparrow might look, from a distance at least, to be a whole, live thing.

  She doesn’t yet know what it means, this sparrow, whether it’s about Dan or her, the past or the future or some mix of them. She’d like to look forward but it’s so hard to, when she knows what can happen. How it feels when the worst thing happens.

  The feathers on the bird’s belly are soft, like dandelion fluff. There is no fat inside for warmth, for winter. When she’s done, she blows the feathers closed over the scar line.

  The lawns are wide, centre-bridged with palm trees that always, because of Dan, remind her of California. But between and around them are the eucalypts, arms wide and shimmering in the sunlight. Elise parks the car near the front and walks, because it’s better this way, to move slowly towards the sadness, the bloom of it. She can’t feel the others, only William, but imagines that, were she sensitive enough, she might feel all of them at once, and that the cemetery is actually a botanical garden, a single, large flower on every plot, turning not towards the sun but towards the past, towards hearts. Maybe now they are turning towards her.

  There is a small rise in the centre and a seat under the trees, where pink-and-grey galahs stalk through the grass. They chatter to each other, checking in. This place reminds her of Groote Eylandt, where a person might put aside the pace of the world and simply walk, gather up quolls in cotton bags, and write. It’s ironic how she’s here, not there, and why. It seems more known, more comfortable not to hope but to imagine that the scans and the appointment tomorrow will go badly, the doctor will tell her what she has already braced herself to hear.

  Today, it feels wrong to bring this small creature with her, inside her, like she is taunting William with the prospect of happiness. Bright clean open air. As she approaches the grave, she knows she will not tell him, William or Dan, though surely he will sense it. A ridiculous thought, that he would even be here at all, or would know it if he were. But still, she can’t help thinking it.

  Elise sits cross-legged on the grass of William’s plot. Plain in comparison with the fake-flower sites to either side, but she hates those cheerful plastic flowers. She would like to give him something real. Beyond, at the back of the property, she can see kangaroos lolling under the trees, and imagines that later, when she’s gone, they might forage here, keep him company.

  ‘We would have been great parents for you,’ she says. ‘The best. We would have loved you so much. We did.’ She pauses. ‘We do.’

  But the words feel artificial because she can only say them, and saying means so little.

  She is watching the kangaroos groom and doze when he arrives. Not William,

  but Dan.

  He approaches quietly and sits beside her, and the air grows warmer. Elise hadn’t realised how cold she’d become in stillness.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You’re back.’ Then, ‘Happy anniversary.’

  He does not kiss or touch her, but she shifts her knee so that it grazes his outstretched legs. They both look out across the headstones to the wild beyond, the kangaroos there.

  ‘It is,’ she says, after awhile. ‘And I was thinking of that place today, too. Where you took me for our second anniversary and they had that weird little room with the taxidermy, all the little animals playing cards and making dinner and … what was that other one? That really terrible one?’

  Dan grimaces. ‘The saloon.’

  ‘You’re right. With the can-can mice or whatever they were, in their litt
le red dresses and feathered hats.’

  ‘And that funny bartender wiping down glasses. What was he?’

  ‘A squirrel.’

  ‘That’s it; his tail hardly fit behind the bar.’

  ‘You know, he had to threaten legal action to get that job.’

  Dan laughs.

  ‘There was this English guy called Potter,’ he says, ‘who did it first, back in the 1800s. Thousands of them—weddings and funerals and tea parties.’

  ‘Life’s big three.’

  ‘To the English, probably, yes.’

  She can see the hotel in her mind, with its funny taxidermy, and Dan, and how much they laughed and drank and …

  ‘That jukebox,’ she says. ‘With all that weird—’

  ‘—French music,’ he finishes, and they laugh, both of them, together.

  ‘I wish this was different,’ says Elise.

  He looks down at his hands and pauses, as though he might say something, and she waits. But when he looks up at her, he’s crying.

  ‘Me, too,’ he says, and he reaches out and takes her hand gently into his own, and in the quiet of the moment, at their son’s grassy grave, she feels a shift between them. Elise senses, in her mind and her skin, faint fibrous tendrils wrapping around and around and around their hands and their bodies and their child

  (the alive and the dead)

  and though they don’t speak, they don’t have to. She feels it, this unseen woven thing, tugging them back towards where they were.

  chapter 20

  Of course, when he gets home, after the cemetery and Elise, the house is empty, chilled with confined air. And not for the first time, Dan wishes for a dog to be at the door, tail wagging, nails scraping against the floorboards, dancing with excitement, the kind of dog he never had growing up, in LA or San Francisco or in his small house in Brisbane.

  A dog.

  A family.

  But that thought is so miserable he nearly laughs at himself, at his fucked-up head for thinking it, puts his bag by the door and shuffles down the narrow hall to the bathroom, should turn the space heater on because he needs it, needs to set his hands against the grill,