Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  “How pregnant are you?” I ask. For some reason, Barbara Ross likes to say, “There’s no such thing as a little bit pregnant!”

  “About three minutes,” Meg says. “Two weeks from conception, actually, which means I’m four weeks. They count a pregnancy as forty weeks, starting from your last period, instead of the actual thirty-eight weeks from conception. I guess the medical establishment thinks women aren’t smart enough to know when they conceived. I know exactly when I got knocked up,” she continues. “Down to the moment.” She winks then, lewdly.

  I want to ask her if she’s worried, if her last miscarriage hovers over her, casting a shadow on her happiness. But she just seems delighted, unclouded. Any emotion untempered by pessimism worries me. For once, though, I manage to keep my mouth shut. “I’m so happy for you,” I say again.

  “Me, too,” she says, and grabs my hand, squeezes it. “Auntie Emily. Can I tell you something?”

  Auntie Emily? I picture myself as a thin spinster, my gray hair pulled back tightly in a bun. I clearly have no need to color my hair. My high white lacy shirt collar is tight and itchy around my neck. Men ignore me. Children fear me. I subsist on Lean Cuisines and Ritz crackers and live in a dark, furnished studio apartment with rust-colored carpeting. If only I hadn’t ruined my marriage, the one good thing I managed to achieve in this life…

  Meg continues, unaware of my fantasy. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think it’s a girl. I had a dream two nights ago. I dreamed that a twelve-year-old girl with long brown hair and pretty lips came up to me and said, ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me. I’m fine.’ I didn’t even know I was pregnant yet! What do you think of that?” Meg’s cheeks flush, but whether it’s from mild embarrassment or just the heightened emotion of the moment, I can’t tell.

  “I think…” I don’t exactly know what I think. All my fears of abandonment by my best friend come flooding back to me, in spite of my efforts to suppress them. They’re mixed with unadulterated worry for Meg, for the zygote she has already imagined as a twelve-year-old. I take a deep breath and let my love for Meg rise up in my chest, let all my hopes for her happiness wash over me; I exhale. Life is delicate and fragile, and every breath is sort of a miracle, really, if you’re inclined to think in those terms. Every rising and falling of the chest is like faith, spontaneous trust in the next breath, belief that it will not be your last, nor will the next one, nor the one after that. You just keep breathing. It’s almost divine, if that’s the way your thoughts run. Meg is pregnant, right now, and maybe, if she’s very lucky, she’ll end up with a new person out of it. I say, “I think Yay!” And I hug my friend tightly again.

  We’re midhug when I hear the screech. “Meg and Emily! Ohmygosh, just like in college! Ohmygosh, You Guys Are TOO CUTE! AREN’T THEY TOO CUTE?” The high-pitched hooting is coming closer to us with every word, like a teakettle whistling, or maybe, I see as I look up, more like peckish jackals scooting up to nibble on an antelope’s carcass. Meg and I disengage from our hug and brace ourselves against the descent of Becky and Angie, the two girls who lived across from us in Devlin Hall during our freshman year of college. They were best friends, like Meg and me, which seemed at first glance like enough of a commonality, so we all hung out together for about fourteen seconds during freshman orientation week. Almost immediately, and simultaneously, we realized that a friendship match had not been made, which bothered no one. We stayed friendly, and Becky and Angie remained an important part of our lives, because from then on, they provided excellent fodder. We defined ourselves by their reflection; we were everything they were not. Sometimes, late at night, as we were drifting off to sleep, Meg or I would whisper, “Becky, do you have any more hairspray? I’m all out, and my bangs are less than two feet high,” or “Angie, did you use the last of my Calvin Klein Obsession? I can’t go to the Kappa Kappa Kappa Kappa Kappa party without spraying at least a quart of my signature scent!” And more than once just the quickest imitation of one of Becky’s or Angie’s prodigious verbal tics disrupted a spat between Meg and me and sent us into gales of laughter. In a way, we owe them our enduring friendship. Of course they don’t know that. I heard a few years ago that they had both moved back to Milwaukee.

  “Hi-eeeee,” Meg says, doing a perfect imitation, even after all these years. But the smile on her face is genuine; surprisingly, it is kind of nice to see them.

  “YouGUYS!” Becky says. “Still together, just like us!” A cloud of sweet, expensive perfume hovers over them. “Of course, we’re not Becky and Angie anymore,” she continues, tilting her head dramatically and brandishing her left ring finger; Angie picks up the cue and does the same. “We’re Becky and Tyler and Angie and Glenn! What about youguys? Are youguys married?”

  “Not to each other!” Angie clarifies, and then she giggles, and it’s the first time I’ve actually heard the sound “tee hee!” come out of a person’s mouth.

  I hold up my left hand and wiggle it, and Meg does the same. I’m wearing my wedding ring, for a change. But no diamond engagement ring shines for their approval on my finger. When we decided to get married, Kevin, ever practical, suggested that we take the two months’ salary he would spend on a diamond and put it into a retirement fund instead. “An IRA is a better symbol of my love for you than a ring,” he said then. “We’re not like that. You don’t even wear jewelry!” He was right. I didn’t tell him then that in spite of my carefully honed cynicism on the subject, I wanted one of those silly diamonds. I notice Becky’s and Angie’s manicured nails, and my bitten, ragged ones. I quickly put my hands back in my lap.

  “We are both totally married!” Meg says. “And I’m pregnant!”

  I understand that this announcement probably just explodes from Meg’s mouth unbidden, driven out of her lips by the force of her excitement. Still, what’s she doing telling these two mynah birds? I look at her, furrow my eyebrows as discreetly as I can. She looks at me, then back at Becky and Angie, smiling.

  They both scream so loudly that the entire coffee shop turns and looks at us. “No way!” Angie cheeps.

  “That is so super!” Becky chirps.

  They mean it, of course; the happy news of marriages and pregnancies is clearly their métier.

  “I just had a baby boy six months ago,” Angie says. She’s rooting around in her oversized handbag, presumably for a photo.

  “And I had a girl last December!” Quicker on the draw, Becky whips out her wallet and unfurls a series of photographs of a fatcheeked little girl in varying stages of hair and tooth growth.

  “She’s beautiful,” Meg says, and I nod. She is.

  “Hannah,” Becky says. “Thirty hours of labor and an emergency C-section!”

  “And this is Glenn junior.” Angie passes us a photograph of what may be the ugliest child I’ve ever seen, a wan, bald-headed, morose-looking creature who resembles a baby eagle more than a human. “He’s my little charmer. Pushed him out in nineteen minutes and got a stage-three tear. Ripped almost all the way from front to back! Anyone want a piece of gum?”

  Meg is still smiling, but her eyes register horror. I just shake my head and flash what I hope is my own smile, but it feels more like a grimace.

  “So, when are you due?” Angie asks, as if Meg were a library book. Her sleek black hair and her tiny, pointy nose call to mind a friendly, curious rodent. Maybe a ferret. This image is much meaner than I feel; I banish it.

  “July,” Meg whispers.

  “And what about you, Emily?” Becky asks. “Is there the pitter-patter of little feet in your house?” I shake my head. Who says these things, anyway? “Any plans for little ones?” she goes on, clueless, her big white teeth gleaming.

  “Some day…” I say in what I hope is a mysterious and aloof tone, my voice drifting off. Actually, my husband is mercilessly haranguing me about this very topic, but I’m super busy these days, because I’ve decided to have an affair. “Probably not for a while.” I look over at Meg again, hoping she’ll have worked out
a polite way of extricating us from this situation. But Meg is staring intensely at the duo, blinded, perhaps, by their tasteful tennis bracelets, and I get no sense that she’s planning our escape. Maybe she’s too busy imagining some version of her future.

  “Where do youguys live?” Angie asks. She and Becky nod politely as we tell them: Kevin and I in our rented apartment, Meg and Steve in their bungalow in a less-than-desirable neighborhood. “Mmmhmmm,” she says cheerfully, clearly unimpressed. “Becky and I are neighbors in Morgan Heights,” she announces, leaning a little bit onto her tiptoes with the news. Morgan Heights is the wealthiest suburb in the metro area. She and Becky immediately launch into a catalogue of names from our shared past and where they all live—lots of people from Madison have apparently ended up in Milwaukee—and, to spice up the discussion, Angie offers a corresponding list of what they all paid for their homes. Angie, it seems, is a real estate agent. “I was,” she emphasizes, “before Glenn junior came along.”

  Becky and Angie have seamlessly morphed from 1990s sorority queens into expensively dressed suburban matrons, slim and toned and encased in brightly colored cashmere coats. They both wear up-to-the-minute shoes, I notice, too—a sort of sneaker/pump hybrid that I heard Melissa-Katherine Parker-Samuels discussing on Entertainment Today. Did Becky and Angie plan for their lives to turn out this way? Did Angie meet Glenn and draw up a flowchart of his personality traits so that she was absolutely certain she’d end up in a huge house with a cleaning service twice a week? Did Becky stand in front of the mirror one day, carefully applying mascara and thinking, I’ll go to business school to meet a man, and I’ll get my MBA and my MRS? Or did it all just fall into their laps? Because I barely have the foresight to plan dinner. And it has always seemed to me that the smallest, most random choice in your life can lead you where you never thought you’d be.

  “Youguys,” Becky says. “We should totally have lunch some time.” She says it so warmly, so sincerely, that I’m about to agree. Just then, Angie catches a glimpse of Hooray for Plate Tectonics! on the table. “Neat!” she exclaims, reaching for it. Underneath Hooray is my pink notebook, on the front of which I’ve scribbled the title, Sole Mates, along with several earlier contenders, including Marlin, My Darlin’; Loves and Fishes; and Salmon to Watch Over Me. I’ve also drawn pictures of fish shaped like hearts, hearts shaped like fish, fish swimming in a pond of hearts, and fish kissing. Meg takes one look at the notebook and giggles; Becky and Angie glance at it and then at each other, and before I can stop her, Angie drops Hooray for Plate Tectonics! back on the table and grabs my notebook instead.

  “That’s just nothing,” I say, my face hot. “I’m working on an editing project. That’s just something I’m playing around with.” I half–stand up and snatch it out of Angie’s hands. “It’s nothing.” I stare at Becky, then Angie; I dare them to laugh at me. Meg I ignore, since she already is laughing at me.

  I hastily drop the notebook back onto the table, where, as if it has free will and is out to spite me, it promptly flips open to a short verse I wrote a couple of months ago, while I was eating a tuna melt. For some reason, lost to me now, I scrawled this particular poem in large, purple block letters.

  Fish, my love for you sticks

  but are we meant to be?

  How I wonder, ponder, flounder

  But I fear our love is doomed,

  for I am scared of water,

  chicken of the sea

  Becky and Angie stand there for a while, their heads cocked toward each other, staring at the poem, puzzled. Becky purses her lips as if she’s about to ask a question but can’t quite form the words. Angie’s perfect eyebrows arch, then furrow. I try to reach for the notebook, but for a weird moment, I’m paralyzed. Meg claps her hand over her mouth, snorting with glee. The tips of my fingers feel itchy and prickly. I look from the notebook to Becky and Angie. Becky reaches up and smoothes a stray wisp of her subtly highlighted blond hair behind her ear. After a long pause, she says, not unkindly, “You were always so creative, Emily.” She and Angie stand there for another endless minute. Nobody says anything. Meg’s hand is still clamped over her mouth. Another snort escapes her.

  “But there’s no money in that,” Angie finally adds, nodding in agreement with herself.

  “Mmmhmmm,” Becky concurs. They both look like they feel very sorry for me. I’m starting to feel very sorry for me. Sole Mates. Love poems to nonhumans. What was I thinking? I feel like that dream everyone has, where I’m walking down the hallway of my high school naked. I feel like all the choices I’ve ever made, right down to the carrot-bran muffin in front of me, have been wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The muffin disgusts me. What was I thinking, ordering a carrot-bran muffin?

  After they finally leave, half-decaf no-foam skim lattes in hand, Meg turns to me. “I’m going to mock you later,” she says, giving my arm a little squeeze. “But right now I need to panic!” Meg won’t really mock me later. She’ll chide, maybe heckle. But in a nice, best-friend-who-believes-in-me kind of way. She reaches for my muffin and takes a huge bite. “Was there any frontal lobe activity in those two!?” She tears off another big chunk of muffin for when she’s finished chewing this one. Meg is a nervous eater. “Am I going to turn into that?”

  “Sweetie,” I say. “It’s going to take much more than a baby to lobotomize you.” I push the muffin across to her. “Do you remember what they were like in college?” I say. “Just like that, only with bigger hair and baggier sweaters.” I can calm Meg. I know that vapid, complacent motherhood is not her destiny. I can feed her reassuring bits of pastry and tell her honestly that she won’t turn into anything she doesn’t want to be. Her way is clear. Meg is solid. It’s my own amorphous self I’m worried about right now.

  “They were nice, though, weren’t they?” Meg says. “I mean, it’s probably really complicated, once you have a kid. It might be easy to slip into that lifestyle.” She looks around the coffee shop, then back at me. “You want the best for your child, and the next thing you know you’ve bought a house where it’s safe and quiet and all white, and you’re driving your six-month-old to his private baby algebra tutor in your Ford Explorer, to hell with the planet!”

  “Meg,” I say, patting her arm, “that’s not how it’s going to be. You’ll make the right choices for this baby. You won’t give in to the pressure to buy an SUV and vote Republican, because you don’t give in to that kind of pressure now. You never have. You’ll be a fantastic mother.” Coffee-tinged acid rises up in my throat. Something has to give.

  DAVID KELLER’S APARTMENT IS NOT WHAT I EXPECTED. But then, neither am I.

  I came over straight from White’s. I still can’t believe I’m here. After forty-five minutes of comforting Meg, I told her that I had to go to work, which in fact was true. She left, full of muffin and reassured about her life. Then, coolly, I packed up my books and notebooks and slid them into my green backpack. I dabbed at my mouth with my napkin and carefully tidied up the table, wiping the crumbs into my palm. I was all movement. I was automated. I searched through my backpack for my cell phone, which I had, as usual, left at home. Undeterred, I thanked the surly girl behind the counter and walked steadily to the pay phone in the back of the store. I called David Keller. I knew his phone number by heart, knew the exact pattern my fingers would make on the keypad, even though I’d never actually dialed his number before. It was two-thirty. As the phone rang, I thought, If he’s not home, it’s a sign. If he’s not home, then this is not my destiny, and he is not the answer to my problems. If he’s not home… But of course he was home. I said, “Do you want to see me?” He said he did.

  Saying, “I’m on my way,” that was the moment my robotic calm turned into a shaky anxiousness. My heart started beating fast at that moment and it hasn’t slowed. Next I called work. The phone felt strange and cold against my ear. I thought about how many germs public phones must harbor. I knew a girl in junior high, Katie Wu, whose mom used to carry alcohol wipes wi
th her. She would scrub down public phones before she’d allow Katie to use them. Dick answered. It took him a moment to remember what to say. “Ahhh,” he said, “Ahhh…Male Reproduction.”

  I told him I wasn’t feeling well. “Stomach flu,” I said, and I felt guilty, but less guilty than if I’d said I had a cold, because, really, my stomach was feeling awfully weird.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear,” Dick said. My scalp began to tingle. Dick told me to rest and to take care.

  Then I called Kevin at work, praying his voice mail would pick up. It did. “Hey, it’s two thirty,” I said. “I’m heading to work now, but I forgot to tell you, Dick has an errand for me to do today, so I won’t talk to you this afternoon, but I’ll see you tonight.” I did this so that Kevin wouldn’t call me at work. My voice sounded perfectly normal to me as I left this message.

  As I walked down the street to my car, I became aware of how often I was blinking. I started to feel as if I were blinking too frequently, and that people might notice and keep their children away from me. I felt as if I were very rapidly going crazy, just a heartbeat away from talking to parking meters. But I got into my car. I turned on the heat and the radio, and I took some deep breaths; everything was familiar, and I started to feel like myself again: a very not-normal sort of myself.