by Rufi Thorpe
I wish badly that I could remember what we were laughing about. Were we making fun of a teacher? Another girl? What had been so funny? But you can never remember what you were laughing about, and even if you could, it seems doubtful that it would still be funny.
We couldn’t stop laughing even when the first test came back positive. I pushed her back into the stall with the second test. Both of us were laughing so hard we were almost choking. Lorrie Ann was snorting and then laughing at herself for snorting. “I can’t believe you’re pregnant,” I kept saying.
“This is terrible!” Lorrie Ann kept saying, even as her diaphragm went on pumping laughter out of her like some manic organ grinder.
An old lady came in at one point (old lady—the woman was probably in her forties!) and gave us disdainful looks, but it didn’t matter: we couldn’t stop.
After the second test came out positive, Lorrie Ann was bent over the sink, laughing so hard it was a kind of sobbing. “Do you want to keep these?” I asked, brandishing the tests. Lorrie Ann stood up, grabbed them from my hands, and held them up to her ears like earrings. “I suppose so,” she said. “What do you think? Do you think Jim will like them?”
“Omigod,” I said, in a high sibilant voice, “are those designer? Are those fucking e.p.t?”
Lorrie Ann shrieked, snorted: “e.p.t!”
When I took the pregnancy test after Ryan Almquist, Lorrie Ann had not been with me. I had been alone, babysitting my little brothers. I took the test, found out I was pregnant, then hid the test stick in an empty box of Alpha-Bits in the kitchen trash and went to watch The NeverEnding Story with my brothers. I snuggled Alex close to me, breathing in his sweet biscuit scent, as I tried to get my heart rate to return to normal. We all stayed up too late that night, our bare legs sticking to the black leather sofas, creaking as we adjusted our positions, watching The NeverEnding Story and then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and then The NeverEnding Story once more. I don’t think I even told Lorrie Ann I was pregnant until after I had scheduled the abortion.
Did it matter? For me, the past had stitched us together so that parts of me were simply connected to parts of Lorrie Ann. But as I waited with her in the bathroom for the pee to absorb, for the stick to change colors, I felt a snag and then a sudden freedom, as though we had finally ripped free of each other and the past no longer mattered. She was just another female animal mouth-breathing with me in the bathroom.
We both watched the test on the lip of the bathroom sink. Slowly the plus sign formed. Lorrie Ann held up the back of the box helplessly: plus is for yes, minus is for no.
She grinned, shrugged. “Exciting!” she said, reaching out to rub my arm.
“No,” I said, swatting her away. “Not exciting.”
“I don’t get it,” Lorrie Ann said. “You’re twenty-nine. You and Franklin clearly love each other. What is the big problem?”
“He broke up with his last girlfriend because she wanted kids.”
Lor made a pucker, sour face. “Ew, that’s not good.”
“I know. She wanted to get married. He felt he wasn’t at the point in his career where he could make that kind of commitment.”
“Is he at that point in his career now?” Lor asked.
“No. It’s a two-body problem,” I hissed. “Both of us are looking for tenure-track positions and it would be almost impossible for both of us to ever find jobs in the same place. It’s a very common academic problem: the two-body problem.”
“But surely there’s some university somewhere in the world that needs a cuneiform person and a Latin person?”
There was a pounding on the bathroom door and both Lorrie Ann and I startled. “How’s it going in there?” Franklin yelled through the wood.
“Good,” I called. “Just a minute.”
Lorrie Ann waited a moment, then whispered, “But have you talked to him about it?”
“It’s one of those things we completely avoid ever talking about. Classics is kind of a dying discipline. These departments aren’t growing. Even if we did manage to find a place trying to fill two positions at once, it wouldn’t be a top-notch place and we are both really, really top notch. Both of us would be taking a hit. The two years of this grant have been—like this magical time outside reality.”
“How do you guys really not talk about this?” Lorrie Ann was gently tapping the pregnancy test against the lip of the sink.
“Because,” I said, “if we publish this book and it’s a big enough deal, which I think it could be, the two-body problem might just go away. We’d have bargaining power. We could say, ‘We work as a team, you can’t get one without the other.’ ”
“I see,” Lorrie Ann said.
“Can we just—obviously I’ll tell him, but this is going to involve some really intense conversations. It’s not just a simple ‘yippee, I’m pregnant’ thing. So can we just tell him this one came back negative?”
“And then what?” Lorrie Ann asked.
“Then next week, or whenever you’re gone, I’ll tell him my period still hasn’t come and take another one and that one will come back positive and then we’ll take it from there.”
Franklin moaned through the door, “I’m dying out here. What does it say?”
“Please,” I whispered.
I knew from the look of pained hesitation on her face that I had already won. I was wrapping up the test in toilet paper, making of it a miniature mummy that I stuffed back in the box and stuck in the trash.
“I don’t like it,” Lorrie Ann said.
Franklin began knocking again, this time more quietly and rhythmically, and I realized he was knocking the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
I pulled the door open. “False alarm,” I said.
“Really?” Franklin said, his hand still frozen and upraised from knocking. “So that’s a negative?”
I nodded. “What a relief, right?”
He backed up to let us out of the bathroom and I moved past him briskly toward the kitchen. If he saw anything amiss in Lorrie Ann’s face, he did not mention it. Both of them simply trailed behind the small amount of wind I made in our hallway by rushing to save my scorched chicken, even as inside me that plus sign finally began to detonate, unfurling inside me a huge mushroom cloud.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Galla Who Accept No Gifts
“I confess,” Lorrie Ann said. “I have no idea when or where Sumer was, and I can’t let this conversation go on any fucking longer without asking.”
Franklin laughed, showing her the wide Cheshire arc of his teeth, which were so white they had an almost bluish cast. His dentist always complained that the teeth of redheads were impossible to match crowns to: a different kind of white than regular people’s teeth. “Sumer is what Iraq was before Iraq was Babylon,” he said.
“Iraq was Babylon? How did I not know this?”
“Because U.S. education is shit,” I said. I had become filled with scorn for the U.S. educational system since I had begun teaching in grad school. My students came to me weirdly unformed, gluey as underbaked rolls.
“Is it really worse than other places?”
“Yes,” Franklin and I answered in unison.
“I asked my kids how long English had been a language. The answers go from two thousand to ten thousand years,” I said.
“I take it English hasn’t been spoken for that long,” Lorrie Ann said. I had lit candles on the table and she leaned forward to press the pad of her finger into a spilled puddle of wax. She had eschewed her cardigan and the golden skin of her shoulders was exposed.
“Oh, you know that,” Franklin said. “You know Jesus was two thousand years ago and he wasn’t speaking English. You know that.”
“I’m just saying,” Lorrie Ann continued, “no one ever asked me a question like that before, so it would be hard to know what to answer. I don’t blame the kids for saying dumb things. You can say dumb things without actually being dumb, you know.”
“I don�
�t blame the kids either,” I said, though I wondered if this were strictly true. I did blame them—for how little they seemed to want, for not demanding more. They were all seemingly half asleep. This was a common conversational topic among academics: what was wrong with the youth, what was causing it, what could be done. We never tired of talking about it and could become passionate even while repeating arguments we’d said a hundred times. “I blame the educational system. Tell me this, how on earth do they manage to avoid teaching them anything meaningful and then turn around and orchestrate complicated sex scandals? Did you see that latest one in California where the kids were all blindfolded and made to drink the teacher’s semen?”
“No, I must have missed that one,” Lorrie Ann said.
“There were pictures—the guy was taking pictures of them blindfolded,” Franklin crowed. “For years! For fucking years!” He reached out for the bottle and refilled his glass. I realized that Franklin was on the road to getting tanked. I held out my glass and Franklin filled it, but Lorrie Ann shot daggers at me with her eyes. I brought the glass to my lips, as though to defy her, but then found myself only pretending to take a sip, like Bensu sipping at a doll shoe. I could not resist resting my hand on the small pudge of my belly. It would only look like I was full, like I had eaten too much, but it comforted me, putting my hand there.
Death was terrifying, but so was life. Life had come for me, was, even as we spoke, even as we pretended that we had directed the course of our lives via conscious decision making and the colossal power of our human forebrains, even as we made puns and repartee in our human language, layering symbols upon symbols, life was directing the forking network of veins in my abdomen and fashioning out of nothingness a creature in the dark.
I did understand that it was I who had insisted on keeping from Franklin the plus sign that was even now continuing to detonate inside me, but the fact that I had chosen all of this did not make it any easier. I felt like I was trying to hide the fact that I was gut-shot. What was worse was how successful my deception was: Franklin did not even notice that there was anything wrong with me. The blood continued to ooze and ooze from me, invisible. Only Lorrie Ann could see it: my fake sip from the doll shoe of my wineglass, my hand resting over the tender tangle of my womb.
“But back to Babylon,” Lorrie Ann insisted.
“Right,” Franklin said. “So first it was Sumer. Then the Akkadian Empire. Then Babylonia. Then Assyria. Then you’re in classical Iraq—a whole bunch of periods, before you’re in medieval Iraq, and that’s where you have the Ottoman Empire, and then pretty much modern Iraq after that.”
“I recognize like all of those names,” Lorrie Ann said, “but I had no idea they were all the same place.”
“Time is long,” I said.
“Well, and,” Franklin pointed out, “each of those empires was larger than just Iraq, they just happened to include Iraq.”
“So explain Sumer to me in like three sentences or less.”
Lorrie Ann’s request made me roll my eyes. She had before her one of the best cuneiform scholars in the world and she wanted the tourist version, as though Franklin’s specialty ought to be tailored to her brief attention span.
“Three sentences? Gosh, that’s tough!” Franklin said, putting his head in his hands and taking the challenge as some kind of fun game. “Okay,” he said, “Sumer is what happens when you have a fertile delta, two rivers, and the ability to import metal and timber from Asia, the invention of bronze so you could make better tools, the invention of the potter’s wheel, and the domestication of the ox. And when you put all those things together, you get the invention of cities, the invention of writing, the flourishing of art and religion, beneficent kings—everything you could ever want. The first major civilization of the world. Was that three sentences?”
“Depends on how you punctuate it,” I said, but they ignored me. I began to stack the plates and ferry them back over to the sink. Lorrie Ann had hardly touched her food.
“So Sumer was before Greece and Rome and all that?” Lorrie Ann asked. I scraped her dinner into the trash.
“Way before. We’re talking 3000 BC as the start of proto-literate Sumer.”
“So this stuff you translate is the first writing ever?”
“Pretty much,” Franklin said.
“Older even than hieroglyphics?” She was examining her own finger, which was now coated in melted wax from the candle she had been playing with. “I thought Egyptians invented writing.”
“No, cuneiform was first. Not by a whole lot, but it came first.”
“That’s crazy cool!” Lorrie Ann said. “So you guys translate like the oldest stuff there is!”
I wanted to slap her. It was almost as though she were playing dumb, exaggerating her own California valley-girl cadences. I had explained ancient Sumer to Lorrie Ann several times on the phone over the past few years. Since Arman, she had been becoming better and better read. And so her protestations of ignorance rang false with me, and I could only assume they were designed either to flatter Franklin or to injure me in some way, to lure me into being some kind of pretentious pedant as an obscure punishment for making her lie for me.
I did not want to think about Sumer. I did not want to talk about Sumer with Lorrie Ann, about all that Sumer had come to be for me, a kingdom of my imagination, a place I could wander in my mind, a way of understanding my own earthy feelings for Franklin. Lorrie Ann did not deserve to know about Sumer. I especially did not want her and Franklin talking about Sumer together for some reason.
There was an ancient Sumerian proverb: Whatever it is that hurts you, don’t talk to anyone about it. That was the kind of hard advice Sumer had to offer. There in the delta, among the oxen and the first poetry ever to be written down, there where men were lettuce planted by the water and goddesses begged to have their holy urns filled with honey cheese, there where civilization had begun. What would they think of us now?
I looked out the window at the glowing lights of Istanbul. I thought they would be amazed. I thought they would be proud. Even including the Holocaust, even including the genocide of the Native Americans and slavery, even including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I looked at Franklin with his healthy white teeth, his unscarred skin, his long, strong bones, and inside him: the architecture of his mind, the vaulted ceilings of his knowledge. Human beings knew so much more now than they ever had. They understood the laws of physics, the rotation of the earth, evolution. Sometimes when I thought about what we were becoming, I couldn’t breathe, so badly did I hope, did I wish that human beings would become all that we could be. Yes, I thought the people of ancient Sumer would be blown the fuck away if they could see my lover Franklin.
“So Jim died in Sumer,” Lorrie Ann said wonderingly.
I realized that what she said was true, and I felt ashamed that I had wanted to keep Sumer from her.
“Jim died in Sumer,” I agreed, and for a moment we all looked at the tablecloth, as though Jim could be discerned in the weft of the fabric. As if that was where he had disappeared to.
“I’m going,” Lorrie Ann said suddenly, “to be going through withdrawal soon.”
Franklin and I both sat up slightly straighter. “Oh?” This was the first time Lorrie Ann had mentioned her drug addiction in front of Franklin and I noted with interest that she was canny enough to understand that I had squealed on her while she was in the bathroom.
“I was wondering if I could do that here.”
“Of course,” Franklin said, then caught my eye. “Right?”
“Of course,” I said. “Does that—I mean, what exactly does that entail?”
“It will be like I have the flu for about three days. Maybe less. No raving. No hallucinating. Just lots of diarrhea and fever.”
Franklin laughed, a little nervous at her honesty, or else delighted—it was hard to say.
“You’re welcome to stay here,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, beaming at him, and then l
ooked over at me and reached out to take my hand. She squeezed it and looked into my eyes. “I am very lucky that you agreed to meet me today,” she said.
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“But,” she said, “is there like a corner store where I could buy some provisions?”
“Provisions?”
“Whatever the equivalent of Imodium A-D is? And some candy bars, maybe? And some juice?”
“There’s a corner store maybe three blocks away,” Franklin offered.
“Perfect. I’ll go. Can I just borrow some shoes from you, Mia?” she asked.
“You don’t like the slippers with the pom-poms?” I asked, laughing. “I just thought—”
“No, I know, I have no idea why I bought them. But I don’t think any of my shoes will fit you—they’ll all be way too big.”
“Don’t you have any sandals or anything?” Lor asked, slipping her cardigan on and getting up from the table. “Flip-flops?”
I didn’t know what to say for a moment. “You know I don’t wear sandals,” I said. My little toe had never become something remotely resembling a toe again. It was just a wad of flesh like chewing gum appended to my foot. Even the little nail had come off and refused to grow back.
“Oh God, I forgot—your toe.”
Franklin was standing and surveying the sink full of dishes, stretching his arms above his head. “Yeah, I’ll never forgive Paddy for that one.”
“Paddy?” Lorrie Ann asked.
And suddenly I knew everything that was going to happen.
“For running over her toe like that. I mean,” Franklin said, “I know it was an accident, but still. The guy’s a lush.”
Lorrie Ann stared at me hard. “You told him that Paddy ran over your toe?”
