Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  The black woman told how one by one we all filled out a stack of paperwork and got blood tests and watched a video regarding our rights. She read aloud the Adrienne Rich quote on a poster in the room where we waited. She repeated the selection of pain medication offered to us on a tiered scale. For an extra hundred dollars we would be provided two substantial caplets of Vicodin. For a hundred and fifty we could be outfitted with a mask delivering a dose of nitrous oxide, which, we were told, smelled and tasted a little like bubble gum and would render us barely conscious during the procedure. These offerings, we were informed, could not be combined, but they were included in addition to a local anesthetic, which we would each receive at no extra cost, and which would be injected directly into the cervix immediately before the procedure. We were invited to consider these options in light of our individual needs and our budgets. Of course, if we wished, we were free to choose none at all. I chose none. I told myself it was because I was broke. At the time I mistook suffering for decency.

  The black woman told whoever how one by one we all got Pap smears and pelvic exams. How the staff did an ultrasound on each of us, and asked if we wanted a copy of what we saw there. I said I did, mostly because the heavy woman operating the device seemed so pleased to be able to offer it. In the image there were white brackets around a dark space. That’s all. Later, I put it in my glove box and did not look at it again. I never showed the image to Sam, though I knew what it would have meant to him. Being with Sam was like standing atop a small hill and seeing my whole fine life unfurled in front of me like prairie.

  The procedure itself lasted under ten minutes, a fact that the nurses often reiterated and that proved technically accurate but did little to capture the character of those ten minutes. A nurse’s aide held my hand. I envisioned Sam sitting out with the fathers. I wondered unkindly whether his presence deflated them. How, I wondered, did they reconcile the facility waiting room with a white, college-educated, clean-shaven twenty-six-year-old—the kind of man their now-wayward daughters would bring home one day, if they turned things around? Later, Sam told me he wouldn’t have been in the waiting room then. He went for a walk, he said, though there was nowhere to walk really, so he just weaved up and down the rows of cars in the mall parking lot, waiting for me to call.

  Afterward, they took us to a room and had us lie on cots. Some of the girls threw up there, including me. The aides gave us apple juice and two cookies for our blood sugar and a prescription for birth control so we wouldn’t be repeat customers. I have told this story occasionally, to my sister and a few others. But Ezra was the only person who ever laughed at that last part. Another reason why I loved him, I suppose. Anyway, the whole experience was as awful as one would expect, and no more so. It was nothing I couldn’t do again.

  This was why my sister came every night, and why she brought the Miracle.

  • • •

  After she left with the Miracle in her birthday getup, Carly called. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Promise you won’t smoke or drink anymore.”

  “What for?”

  “You never know,” she said buoyantly.

  “Actually, Car, the sad thing is how often you do know.”

  “Come on,” she said. “For me.”

  “This is fucked up,” I said; then I promised.

  It should have been easy to quit; I’d only ever smoked with him, for him. It wasn’t easy—I was anxious and found I didn’t know what to do with my hands—but I did it. I stopped drinking, too, and took to having lemonade with my peanut butter cups. I read faster, and I became more disturbed by the things I read. Often, I had to stop. I’d set the book aside and look at my naked body. I imagined tumbling through plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche. I distended my stomach so it rose from the surface of the water. It was too early for that, of course. Those cells were barely the size of a cranberry, or so Carly told me. Sometimes I went underwater to see how long I could stay there. I opened my eyes, saw those brownblack wrappers moving above me like his boats, like insects alighted on the surface of the Truckee. I saw him there. I wished I didn’t, but I did.

  • • •

  When Carly was pregnant with the Miracle she tried never to become upset or angry, always to be calm. That was why the Miracle turned out so even. But it seemed all I was was upset and angry. It is such a short distance from the heart to the womb. I could see foul chemicals injecting into Cranberry. What if the first feelings she ever felt were loss and fear and anger? It must sour a person profoundly to have these as first feelings. This is probably what happened to me.

  • • •

  The Museum of Love Lost could have a Mother Wing. Arranged in reverse chronological order, it might start with an archive of yellowing newspaper articles: Fatal Accident Causes Major Power Outage; Thousands in Northwest Reno Without Electricity after Car Slams into Power Pole. (Ezra, when I told him: “I remember that day. We got out of school early.”) From there a visitor might move through a catalogue of all the matchbooks our mother gave Carly and me when she visited us at our grandmother’s in Sun Valley. Carly kept hers in a mason jar on the dresser we shared—booklets from Sparky’s, Bully’s, Crosby’s, little boxes from the Bonanza, the Horseshoe, the Polo Lounge. I burned my matches up as soon as our mother left, not because I wanted to destroy them, but because I couldn’t resist the smell of them burning, or the satisfying snap of those chalky heads against that grainy strip.

  There might be pungent tubes of the same variety of henna our mother used to dye our brown hair red when we were girls, back when we still lived with her, because she wanted us to look more like her. Here is a photo of us sitting in the gravel driveway in front of our trailer, our hair swirled high on our heads with the rust-colored clay, letting, she said, the sun do its thing. We are maybe five and ten. I am wearing only white cotton underpants.

  The Mother Wing might end with a display of dried, pressed sprigs of sage and wild mint from the drainage ditch behind the trailer, which we used to pick by the armful and bring to our mother while she slept.

  But most likely, the Mother Wing would be completely empty.

  • • •

  Carly came over the next night with the Miracle dressed in a fuzzy brown bear outfit. Small bear ears peeked up from the hood, and soft claw mittens from the arms, and a tail on the ass wiggled bearlike as she crawled.

  “Why is she wearing that?” I asked.

  “She likes it,” Carly said. “Watch this.” She asked the Miracle, “Who’s a bear?”

  The Miracle bared her newest teeth and dropped her mother’s cell phone to display her claws. “Who’s a bear?” Carly said again.

  The Miracle squealed, snapped her teeth together and then roared a too-happy roar.

  “That’s adorable,” I said, and it was.

  Carly looked pleased. She said, “Maybe you should get out of the bath.”

  “Some days I thank God I can lock myself in my apartment and no one has to be around me,” I said. “What if I always have those days? A baby is there. All the time.” These things were just occurring to me.

  “Have you thought any more about that docent program?” she said. “I could still get you an interview.”

  “I’ve already started,” I said, waving her to my nightstand.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  She hovered over the things Ezra had emptied from his pockets our last night together. They were arranged on the nightstand just as he’d left them, waiting to be labeled and mounted on acid-free paper: a credit card receipt from a bar up the street. The chewed cap of a pen. Some change and a five-dollar bill creased in the middle like an accordion, which he used for a trick where he’d make it look like Abraham Lincoln was smiling or frowning, depending on how he held it. A near-empty sack of tobacco.

  “What is it?” Carly called to
me.

  “Family heritage,” I said. “In case Cranberry wants to know who her father was. There he is, girlie: generous tipper, oral fixater, Civil War buff, roller of exquisitely proportioned cigarettes.”

  Carly returned to the bathroom, ineffably bright-eyed. “Do you really think it’s a girl?”

  “God. I hope not.”

  Carly knelt on the floor beside the tub. She put her hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “Alex and I could help you. Cranberry and the Miracle could be friends. Like us. It could be like when we were kids. Before things got bad.”

  I said, “Things were always bad.”

  “They weren’t,” said Carly. “You were too young. But they weren’t.”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  The Miracle screeched.

  “I’m not.” Carly stood and lifted her daughter, holding her like a shield. “It’s just—do you have to be so hard on everyone?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  The Miracle took her mother’s earring into her mouth. Carly extracted it gingerly. “You make him sound like some sort of flimflam man.”

  “That’s what he is, Car. A flimflam man.”

  “Come on—”

  “No. That’s exactly what he is. A flimflam man with a nice laugh. A cokehead flimflam man who left me with a nicotine addiction and some trash from his pockets. Tell me a baby’s gonna change that.”

  The Miracle clapped her hands on the earring and said, “All right!”

  “You’re never going to feel ready for this, Nat. They make you ready.”

  “What if they don’t? What if I have it and the only difference is I think, ‘I’m going down and I’m taking this kid with me’?”

  She winced. “It won’t be like that.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “It was like that for us.”

  After some time she said, “You’re right.”

  I was thinking of our mother, but I was also thinking of Carly, of a time when I was at her house, just after the Miracle was born. In those early days their place throbbed with people. Alex’s mother and father were visiting from Arizona, and Carly’s girlfriends were constantly stopping by with dinners and hand-me-downs and complicated baby-soothing devices. I watched them the way a person watches a parade she’s accidentally come upon.

  Then, one afternoon, a strange quiet overtook me and I looked up from the sink where I was washing dishes. It was as though silence had swallowed the house and we were suspended in the dark warmth of its throat. Carly and I were alone with the baby. The Miracle was maybe four days old. Carly was feeding her in a rocking chair in the living room. When the baby fell asleep Carly motioned me to her. “Can you take her?” she whispered, nodding to the crib. I lifted the Miracle and laid her down the way I’d seen Alex do. When I came back Carly reached for my arm.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said. She looked like a badly weathered drawing of herself, exhausted. “I don’t think I love the baby. I mean I do. But not the way Alex does.”

  I told her that was natural, that a lot of women feel that way at first. I was repeating some Oprah shit she’d told me months earlier. I said she was tired, that she should try to nap. She nodded emptily. “Of course you love her,” I added as I walked her to her bed. She lay on top of the blankets.

  As I closed the curtains she said, “I don’t.”

  I said, “Shh,” and went into the living room to fold laundry. The bedroom door was open and I could hear her breathing, her head softly shifting on the feather pillow. “I don’t,” she said over and over. “I don’t.” Then she fell asleep. We never talked about it again.

  • • •

  In this one Ezra and I are drinking coffee and sharing a miniature newspaper. We woke up with that loopy, underwater kind of hangover, the sort that pleasantly expands to consume an entire day. We walked to this shoe-box café, hand in hand. We are carved from wood blocks, and the midmorning sun glitters on our grooved faces. I’ve told him about that day, about how afraid Carly made me. How she was saying things our mother might have said. What I need to know, I’ve told him, is if that feeling ever left her. Because if it never left her, it would never leave me.

  Ezra has leaned across the table and taken my face in his hands. “Hey,” he’s said. “Look at me. You’re not her. You hear me? You’re not anyone but you.” I’ve pulled away from him. “You don’t get it,” I’ve said. “It’s in me.” He’s hurt—see his eyes, his soft upturned hands—and I am surprised that I am capable of hurting him. “Christ,” he is saying. “It’s like I’m trying to dig you out when all you want is to be buried with her.” I call it The Truest Thing You Ever Said.

  • • •

  When Carly arrived the next night, she came into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The Miracle wore a pair of sparkly gold fairy wings and a headband with a giant sunflower mounted to one side. She held a pair of orange plastic nunchucks, the only toy I’d ever seen her interested in.

  I was in the bath. “I thought she wasn’t allowed to play at violence,” I said.

  “Guns mostly,” said Carly. “We don’t have a nunchuck policy.” Then she said, “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “I brought someone here. You should probably put some clothes on.”

  I rose out of the tub and wrapped myself in my bathrobe. Everything was worth it. Ezra would see how I’d kept our world as he’d left it, how I never stopped wanting him. I saw his fingers tracing over our old life. He’d take me in his arms and say what an idiot he’d been. He’d say, I want this. One hundred percent. All the time. Anything he said would have been enough. He could have said nothing.

  Instead, bent over the artifacts on my nightstand was Sam.

  The Miracle smacked her mother with her nunchucks and said, “All right!”

  “Hey,” Sam said. “How are you?”

  I said, “Uh, okay.”

  He glanced at Carly. “I was thinking we could go for a walk,” he said to me. He looked fitter, slimmer in the face. He wore a dark green sweater I didn’t recognize. This baffled me, that he’d bought a sweater. I said, “I’ll get dressed.”

  Out on the sidewalk, Sam said, “Which way?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” We started out on our old route toward the river.

  Neither of us spoke. My fingers were cold. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. “What’s with the nunchucks?” I said.

  “You never told me whether she had a boy or a girl.”

  We were quiet again, the only sounds our shoes on the sidewalk, and occasional cars driving by. “You could have gotten something neutral,” I said.

  He shrugged. I remembered that easy Sam shrug. “Those are cool, right?”

  “Yeah. They’re cool.” We turned a corner and I pulled a dying leaf from a low-hanging branch. “What did she tell you?”

  “Everything, I think.”

  I ripped segments off the leaf and let them fall papery to the ground. “Everything.”

  Sam nodded to the leaf. “Bigtooth maple.”

  “I know,” I said. “I remember.” I spliced the stem with my thumbnail and we went on quietly. Finally I said, “I’m not going to have it.”

  “She says you haven’t made the appointment yet.”

  “I keep thinking things might change.”

  “And you haven’t told him?”

  “It’s stupid. I know.” We came upon the river. Midway across the bridge we stopped and leaned on the rail.

  “She says you’re saving his stuff.”

  “Not saving it.” I let the last shred of the leaf flutter to the water. “I love him. I go to make the appointment and I can’t. I’m sitting there with the phone and my fucking calenda
r, you know? Like I’m having my teeth cleaned. It isn’t the baby. Maybe it’s just . . . I don’t want us reduced to an appointment. We were more than that.”

  He sighed and dipped his head between his big hands.

  “Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t.

  Sam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. His face was red. “You never thought that about us?”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  I turned back toward the water. He turned and faced the water, too. “I still think about it,” he said. “Ours.”

  I felt ambushed, suddenly, though of course I had been all along. “I don’t, Sam. Don’t you get that? I don’t think about it. I never have. I’m all fucked up. You never got that.”

  He laughed a laugh with an edge to it, a laugh I’d rarely heard from him and only toward the end. “I get that,” he said. “Believe me. That’s not why I came. I told Carly I’d talk to you.” He looked up. “But I know you, Nat. I know what you’re capable of. What you’re not.” His hands were trembling at the rail. “Look at you. You don’t even want to be happy. We were good together. We were happy. Ours was the right one and you couldn’t stand it. And now. This guy?”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  He was right and I should have told him as much. Instead I said, “We should get back.”

  He nodded once and turned. We walked back without speaking, him always a few steps ahead of me. A couple times his back straightened and he inhaled sharply as if he wanted to say something. But he never did. In front of my apartment he said, “I’m going to catch a bus. Let your sister know, will you?”

  I said, “Wait, Sam. Will you wait a second?” I brought my keys out of my pocket and unlocked my car.

  It had been glossy when they printed it out but it had gone satin, somehow. The edges of the quarter sheet had curled in on themselves. He took it from my hand. “What’s this?”