Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  Heather tears off a hunk of her sandwich. “He said, ‘Hevver,’ because he can’t quite pronounce my name, but that’s not the adorable part. He said, ‘Hevver, do you know what rhymes with sugar? Booger!’” She looks first at me, then at Meg, proud, grinning. “Don’t you think that’s adorable?”

  “Adorable,” I repeat, incredulous and no longer hungry.

  “Sweet!” Meg echoes pleasantly, digging into her own sandwich, obviously not conjuring up the same disgusting image that’s in my head.

  I take a big gulp from my water bottle, squint up at the blue sky. This cheery wife- and stepmother-to-be is my cynical, hard-edged little sister. This is my sister who, just last summer, stared back at a little boy on the sidewalk who was gaping at her, the way toddlers do, and muttered, “Take a picture, kid; it lasts longer.” This is the girl who at fifteen tried to convince my parents to let her get her tubes tied.

  “I mean,” she says now, grabbing her napkin as it’s about to blow away, “I just think it’s so unusual for a three-year-old to be able to come up with a rhyme like that!”

  “So unusual,” Meg agrees, without sarcasm. She rifles through her bag and pulls out one of the pregnancy bibles she now carries with her at all times. Most of Meg’s pregnancy books look like they’re geared toward mothers-to-be with questionable IQs, or maybe pregnant teenage cheerleaders; they have bright covers, zippy illustrations, and titles like You Grow, Girl! She flips through the pages of No Thanks, I Gestate. “Gosh, I hope peanut butter is okay!” she says to no one.

  Kevin went to work this morning and is planning to meet me at Dick’s funeral this afternoon, so I suggested to Heather and Meg an impromptu picnic in the park. I needed a way to pass the time today that didn’t involve David. Although he was my first choice, he e-mailed me this morning to say that he wouldn’t be able to get together until the middle of the week at the earliest. It felt like a preemptive strike. “I’ve got a crazy deadline again,” he wrote. “Should we plan on seeing each other Wednesday or Thursday? Friday might even be best.” I was so close to writing back to him: “Why can’t you see me? What have I done wrong? Are we through? Do you want to end this?” I actually had to sit on my hands to prevent them from putting on such an embarrassing display. So I sat there, staring at David’s message, my throat dry and my hands numb, and I thought, What now? And then I heard my father’s voice in my head. “When life gives you lemons,” Len is fond of saying, “take them back to the supermarket. What do you need lemons for?” I called Meg, and by the time Heather woke up, I had already packed the picnic basket.

  “Emily,” Heather says. She flips her hair back with a toss of her head, like a pony. “Isn’t it wild? You’re going to be a step-aunt!” which immediately makes me think of something small and squished on the sidewalk.

  Meg laughs and squeezes Heather’s arm. They’ve been talking about babies and toddlers for the past twenty minutes. I sigh, then stuff a carrot stick in my mouth to cover it up.

  “Rolf and his ex-partner practiced attachment parenting with Silas,” Heather tells us with a serious nod, “which I think has made him extremely self-confident.” I imagine a self-confident three-year-old, a tiny Napoleon. Aren’t toddlers too self-confident to begin with? Isn’t that the problem?

  “I completely agree!” Meg practically shouts. “Steve and I are going to co-sleep, and I fully intend for one of us to be holding the baby at all times!” She crunches happily on a pretzel.

  “That’s so great,” Heather says, intense as a recent convert, adamant as a cult member.

  “I just hate it when I see moms carrying their babies around in car seats,” Meg continues. “They seem so lonely in there, the poor little things. I’ve already bought myself a sling.”

  “I didn’t know you were broken!” I say, my mouth full of carrot, and they both ignore me. This is exactly what I wanted: for Meg and Heather to connect. In twelve years, this is the first time they’ve engaged in anything more substantive than a five-minute chat. I’m glad for them. I just thought I’d be able to get a word in. This was the morning I was going to tell them about David.

  “So, when did you first know you were pregnant?” Heather asks Meg, leaning forward, an eager disciple.

  “Well, we were trying,” Meg says, the undertone of a slightly tawdry confession in her voice. “But after my miscarriage I wasn’t convinced it was going to happen, so I was telling myself not to think about it.” Meg takes another bite of her sandwich; Heather is rapt while Meg chews, swallows. I look around at the empty picnic tables nearby, stifle a yawn. Two squirrels chase each other up a tree. “I was kind of pretending I didn’t care, so that I wouldn’t be disappointed. But then, one day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten my period. And I’m usually bang on time.”

  “That’s what you and Steve did!” I say loudly. “Bang on time!” Suddenly I’ve become a fourteen-year-old boy. Once again, I’m ignored.

  “Sure enough,” Meg continues, rolling her eyes in my general direction, “the test was positive.”

  “That must have been such an amazing moment,” Heather says, and it occurs to me with a jolt that Heather and Rolf are probably planning to give Silas a brother or sister before too long.

  “But what about you?” Meg says. “You’re already a mother, in a way. What’s that like?” And they’re off, the two of them, Heather describing in detail Silas’s many charms and the complex task of relating to a small child, Meg interjecting with questions about potty training and sleep training and how to train a picky eater, as if she were getting ready to adopt a puppy. Heather is waxing poetic about Silas’s love of avocados when it hits me: bang on time. I’m usually bang on time, too, and I can’t remember the last time I got my period.

  Heather reaches across the picnic table and tugs my hair, the way she used to when we were little, to get my attention. “Are you there?” she says. “Are you with us?”

  “Huh?” Apparently I’ve lost the thread of this discussion, frozen by my own realization. If I’m pregnant, my God, if I’m pregnant, then I’m carrying David’s baby. Probably David’s. David’s? I suddenly feel nauseous, which makes me feel even more nauseous. David and I have been careful, but once in a while things have gotten dicey. At least, thank God for small favors, Kevin and I haven’t even had sex since…suddenly I can’t remember the last time Kevin and I had sex. I try to do fast calculations as Heather waves her hands in front of my face. “Yoo-hoo!” she trills. My head is starting to float away from my body like a balloon, barely attached to a flimsy string. The last time Kevin and I were together was—before my last period? After? Holy God, I might be pregnant, and I don’t know who the father is. I look up at the sky and whisper, “No,” a prayer, a plea.

  “No what?” Heather asks. “Emily, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I just…I don’t like avocados.”

  Heather and Meg shoot each other a look. “Okaaay…” Heather says.

  “You don’t have to,” Meg says in a slightly too-high voice, looking at me, perplexed.

  I used to be a good person. I always told the truth, and I never cheated on a test, much less a man. I’ve never stolen anything or even undertipped a waitress, and one time, when the bank teller accidentally handed me an extra twenty dollars, I gave it right back. When I held Kevin’s hand in my parents’ backyard on a bright spring day five years ago and said my vows to him, my voice quivering and tears rolling down my face, I meant it; I meant every word. But this clinches it: I’m not a good person; I’m not the Emily I thought I was. I look at Meg and Heather, in the happy throes of making something of themselves, of being adults, of moving forward. If I tell them about David, they won’t be impressed, or deliciously scandalized; they won’t giggle and clap their hands over their mouths and demand details. They’ll be appalled by what I’ve done. They’ll be disgusted. And then I realize: they’re not the ones I need to tell. I have to clean up this mess and set things right with Kevin, whatever that mea
ns. I have to figure out who I want to be with. But first, I need to find out if I’m pregnant.

  KEVIN SQUEEZES MY HAND. “DO YOU WANT TO LEAVE?” he whispers. It’s a valid question: I haven’t stopped crying since we walked through the door of the church. I took one look at Dick’s tiny, brave wife, and I started sobbing, a full fifteen minutes before the service even began. Tears just poured out of my eyes, and they haven’t stopped. I gush, like a burst pipe, like a sprinkler system in a burning office building. I’ve been crying so hard that people keep turning to look at me. They probably think I’m family. Even Dick’s family looks at me, puzzled. The minister mentions Dick’s kindness, and I dab at my eyes with a soggy tissue. He talks about Dick’s devotion to his wife and children and grandchildren, and I swipe harder. He illustrates Dick’s lovable domestic incompetence by telling a story about the time he tried to surprise his family by cooking dinner and accidentally gave everyone food poisoning, and noises that sound like a lamb being strangled escape from me.

  Kevin squeezes my hand again. “Really, we can step outside if you want to.” I’m hiccupping now, loudly. The sympathetic look that’s been etched onto Kevin’s face since I told him Dick had died is only deeper and more compassionate, but it’s underlined with the slightest tinge of embarrassment, and I can’t blame him. I’m practically hyperventilating. In college, Meg learned in a history class that Victorian women would sometimes be diagnosed with hysteria and forced to undergo the removal of their reproductive organs. For months, when we were laughing really hard at something, or crying during a movie, one of us would whisper to the other, “I need a hysterectomy!” I would say this to Kevin now, if I thought he’d have any idea what I was talking about.

  I shake my head at Kevin, try desperately to gain control. Dick’s wife is sitting in the front row between their two children, Elizabeth on one side, and Richard, the son I’ve never met, on the other. They all look so stoic and yet so crushed, with their excellent Presbyterian posture and their pale, pale faces. I feel like a hired mourner, crying my hot, ethnic tears, crying enough for all of them.

  Since having been struck by the lightning bolt realization this morning that I might be pregnant, I haven’t been alone for a second, much less for the time it would take to go to the drugstore, buy the pregnancy test, and then come home and take it. And that’s only half the battle. I wish there were a companion test you could buy, perhaps in the Brazen Hussy aisle at Walgreen’s: half price when you purchase one Easy Step Pregnancy Test, a Who’s-the-Daddy Indicator Stick. Beeps once for Your Husband, twice for Your Lover! But Meg and Heather came back to the apartment after our picnic, and then they walked me to the church, where Kevin was waiting. So all I’ve been able to do today is ruminate over the incredible, horrible, self-induced cataclysm that is my life. Every time I close my eyes, I see a different version of the same child, a Mr. Potato Head baby. If David is the father, the baby would be dark and exotic looking, with big brown eyes and strong features. If Kevin is the daddy, the kid would be a more neutral balance: lighter eyes, lighter hair, a smaller nose…

  There’s a hush in the church now, as Dick’s son rises to give the eulogy. This is starting to feel like a wedding…although of course the groom is dead. And there’s no bride. And everyone is really sad. But the ceremony feels familiar. Maybe it’s the reverence of it, the seriousness of what is being marked, and the way everyone knows his or her role—the grieving family, the supportive relatives, the darkly dressed, subdued (except for me) mourners. This is only the second funeral I’ve ever been to, but I suddenly see that these events are not so much about honoring the wedded or the dead, but about ensuring that everyone else knows what to do.

  Richard makes his way to the podium, shuffles a few papers around, clears his throat. He looks like Dick, without the paunch. His face is the same; I can see that even from fifteen feet away. His eyes have the same almond shape as Dick’s, the same kindly crinkles edging toward the sides of his face. Their foreheads furrow into identical patterns. Dick used to talk about Elizabeth constantly, less about Richard, with whom his relationship was more distant, more formal. But when his son’s name did come up, Dick would puff up with pride. “Richard,” he would say, “has been given quite a large promotion at his agency,” as if he were talking about a Fortune 500 company instead of the tiny environmental nonprofit Richard toiled away at. “Richard,” Dick told me the other day, standing, as usual, in the doorway of my office, arms crossed proudly over his barrel chest, “has just received more accolades for his very important work on behalf of our rivers and lakes.” I have a hunch, studying Richard as he pulls himself together in front of a room full of Dick’s friends and family, that he has no idea how proud he made his father, and I’m seized with the urge to stand up, right now, and tell him, because life is obviously way, way too short.

  “My dad,” Richard says, looking down at his notes and then peering into the crowd, “would have been delighted to see you all here. Dick loved a party.” And a new geyser of tears erupts from me.

  After the service, as people are beginning to leave for the cemetery, I make my way over to Dick’s family. My eyes are finally dry. I’m just as desolate, but I think I’ve emptied myself of liquid. I was a grape; now I’m a raisin. I feel shrunken and parched. I probably won’t have to pee for days. I lean against the wooden armrest of a pew and wait awkwardly at the fringes of the small group surrounding Dick’s family. I look around, fiddle with my hair, adjust my dress, shift from one foot to the other in my uncomfortable shoes. I know that I don’t really belong anywhere near this intimate circle, but I need to make contact. Finally, spotting a small opening in the crowd, I squeeze in next to Dick’s birdlike wife, Jane. Dick once told me that, before their children were born, they had a dog named Spot, just because they couldn’t resist. “Neither of us even wanted a dog,” Dick said. “Never did care for that mutt.” Jane looks at me, her pretty, powdered face a network of fine lines, her eyebrows slightly raised. She can’t place me. I lean down, feeling like a giraffe next to her, touch her shoulder, and say softly, “I’m Emily. I worked for Dick at the journal.”

  “Of course,” she answers, taking hold of both of my hands. “He spoke so highly of you, Emily.” Jane is so short that if she were looking straight at me, she’d be staring at my chest. She has to tip her face up toward mine, which makes her look even more vulnerable than a seventy-year-old woman would normally look at her husband’s funeral, and I have to press my lips together to keep from crying again.

  “I’m so sorry,” I finally manage.

  “We were married for forty-nine years,” Jane says. “We would have celebrated our fiftieth anniversary this June.” She says it with more wonder and pride than sadness. “He was always a surprise to me.” Her voice is startlingly low and gravelly for someone so tiny. She looks radiant for a split second; her eyes widen and the darkness over her face just seems to lift; it’s as if she’s watching a movie in her head, watching one of the good parts flash by. Then Elizabeth takes her by the elbow and gently leads her away, toward the next set of people waiting to comfort themselves by comforting her, eventually toward the door. Richard, who had been standing next to his mother the whole time, looks at me and smiles.

  “Dad really was so fond of you,” he says. “I’ve wanted to meet you. I’m only sorry it has to be under these circumstances.” He waves his hands around vaguely, then drops them to his sides. Up close, Richard doesn’t look nearly as much like Dick as he did from afar, I notice. His eyes are hazel, not brown like Dick’s, and his mouth—wide, with full lips—is completely different. I decide then that telling a thirty-seven-year-old man that his father was proud of him would be condescending, better suited to a bar mitzvah, so I just smile back, and then, impulsively, I hug Richard. At first he’s surprised—I feel him startle, his back stiffen—but then almost immediately he hugs me back. I take a big breath—he smells good, like vanilla—and draw away.

  “I’m so sorry.” That’s all I
seem to be able to say today, but really, it is a funeral, after all. Richard nods, looking sort of bemused. I’m still thinking about what Jane said, “He was always a surprise to me,” as I head toward the exit.

  Kevin is waiting for me outside, near the edge of the parking lot, away from the mourners. He looks anxious. He’s probably eager to get back to work. “You okay now?” he asks. He’s ready for me to be okay, ready for the waterworks to have dried up.

  “Fine.” I take his hand. What will I say to him if I’m pregnant? How do you tell your husband, who has been trying to convince you to start a family, that his wish has come true, but, woops, the baby might not be his? Jesus.

  It turns out that the church is only a few blocks from our apartment, but I’d never noticed it, tucked back on a side street behind a thick hedge cover, like a secret hideaway only Presbyterians know about. We duck through the bushes and walk up to Oakland Avenue, the busy street of stores and cafés, packed with midday shoppers and workers on their lunch breaks. Kevin is staring at his feet as we walk, as if he’s never seen them before. Oh, look, feet! So useful! On the sidewalk, he lets go of my hand. We’re trying to cross the street, but no one will slow down. We can’t find a break in the traffic. He looks up from his shoes and squints, fixes his gaze on the rush of cars zooming past. He takes one tiny, tentative step off the curb, then immediately backs up again. “Emily,” he says softly, so that I have to lean in to hear him underneath the noise of a nearby delivery truck. “Do you still want to be married to me?”