It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  Each night she whispered herself to sleep, ticking off tomorrow’s tasks until she was still and lost beside him.

  These attempts to order life’s sloppiness Henry found touching—the way she stacked her pillows on her side of the bed, folded her clothes neatly in the laundry hamper. His things—wallet, ties, handkerchiefs—sprawled around the rooms like relaxed, friendly guests.

  One morning, shortly before their second anniversary together, Meg pressed him, “Do you think you’d like to be a father someday? What do you think of children?”

  They’d never even talked about marriage. “Don’t you think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves?” he asked. He didn’t mean to stall; he’d honestly never considered kids.

  “I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about,” Meg said.

  “Well, how do you feel?”

  “I asked you, Henry. Don’t turn it around on me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Forget it, then.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  After that, she acted impatient with him whenever he broached the subject. He still didn’t know how he felt; on the other hand, he had no trouble at all picturing himself with a little girl or boy, playing catch on a lawn, scribbling dragons with crayons, or singing the child to sleep with tales of princes or cows. These thoughts even warmed him—maybe he knew how he felt after all.

  But Meg wouldn’t talk about it now. She looked more exhausted than usual each evening when she returned from her job at the advertising agency. One night she went to bed immediately after supper. “What’s the matter?” he whispered. She flinched when he touched her.

  “I’m tired of having to make up my mind, and yours, about every little thing, Henry.”

  His hand stiffened on her hip. “That’s not fair, Meg, and you know it.”

  “No?” He caught the scornful edge in her voice, a quick swipe in the air like a lawn-mower blade. “I’ve tried and tried to get you to act—”

  “Exactly! You even want to plan my taking control!”

  “That’s not true.”

  “When you’re ready to discuss something, we have to decide on the spot, right? I like to take a little more time, honey, be a tad more careful—”

  “Damn you, Henry!”

  “Well, damn you too!”

  “I can’t stand it!”

  “Who’s asking you to?”

  That night he spent, angry, on the couch, listening to her wracked sobbing in the bedroom. In the morning he apologized; so did she, and that evening they baked a nice lasagna together (she insisted on adding a dash more basil after he’d stuck it in the oven), and made love after dinner.

  Two weeks later, she disappeared for a couple of days, a Thursday and a Friday. When she showed up again, early Saturday morning, looking washed-out and weary, she wouldn’t tell him where she’d been.

  “For God’s sakes, I was frantic, Meg. I was ready to call—”

  “I had to be on my own for a while, to think things through.”

  “What things?”

  “Our things.”

  “You had me worried sick.”

  “Henry.” She touched his arm—more gently, he thought later, than she ever had. “I want you to move out,” she said.

  He woke with the sliver of a hangover, a piercing ache right above his left ear.

  At lunch, he called Kate from work. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better today, thanks. It’s such a relief to wake up and not see those boxes. Thank you. I’m afraid I was a bit of a pill last night—”

  “Not at all.”

  “No, I was in a pissy mood. I know I wasn’t pleasant. If you’re still game, I’d like to see the Cocteau film. My treat, okay? Make it up to you.”

  He assured her she didn’t owe him a thing, but they agreed to meet at the theater at seven. He spent the afternoon tracking the quarterly losses of a local shoe company, a raggedy wholesale outfit whose CEO had come to him for help. Their books were a tangle, and by the time he got off work he was beat.

  Kate in her yellow smock perked him up. She’d tied her hair in a lazy bun; it wasn’t going to stay, and he found himself gleefully eager, waiting for the soft and sexy tumble.

  The theater was sparse, stale, cramped. The film—an old, scratchy print—broke twice, blurred: Beauty looked as bristly as the Beast. The crowd booed. Henry didn’t care. He was happy, holding Kate’s hand. He cried at the end, when the handsome lovers kissed.

  Afterward they walked to the hamburger shop to split a basket of fries (“I’m craving grease,” Kate said, “platters and platters of grease”). Kitschy paintings of Marilyn and Elvis lined the light-green walls, old 45s (“Telstar,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Love Potion Number Nine”) stocked the restored, ancient jukebox, and a pair of fifties’ car fins crowned big silver doors marked “Guys” and “Gals.”

  The Cokes came in thick glass cups with paper straws.

  Henry loved the good-old-days decor, the laughter, the talk. Men and women at play. “They do nostalgia very well here,” he said. “Kind of romantic.”

  Kate nodded.

  “Anything wrong?”

  “No. Well. Ben and I used to come here.”

  “Oh,” Henry said. “Of course. Of course. We can go somewhere else.”

  “It’s not the place, Henry. Really. I like it. It’s … when you mentioned nostalgia …”

  “What?” He touched her hand.

  “It hit me: that was Ben’s whole deal. I mean, look where I live.”

  Henry reconsidered the tables. He noticed the curves of the booth seats, the plump leather angles that spilled people into each other, accommodating the body’s desires. “I’m not a college kid,” Kate said. “But here I am, right in the middle of the Nikes and the back-assward baseball caps. Why?” She shook her head. “Ben wanted to ‘stay young.’ He liked living like a student. Reminded him of his best days, as a fraternity jock.”

  “Football?”

  “Soccer and track.” She slurped her Coke. “And fucking.”

  Henry squeezed her fingers.

  “I knew of at least a couple of affairs he had right after we married. He’s probably having one now.” She rubbed her eyes. “He doesn’t want a baby because he’s an immature little piss-ant.”

  “A deadbeat.”

  “A son of a bitch.”

  They laughed together.

  All along, these last few days, Henry had been thinking of Ben as The Bastard. Anyone who’d give up ample Kate—

  “Well,” she said. “It’s a weary old story.”

  “Not to you. To you it’s your life.”

  She looked at him, over the cooling basket of fries. “You’re a nice man, Henry.”

  “I like you.”

  “I know,” she said. Behind her, Marilyn tried to fluff down her skirt.

  He fed Kate a fry. “Where would you live if you could?” he asked.

  She told him she’d been a high school exchange student in Germany, and loved the countryside, but the rules! “I couldn’t survive long in such an ordered world.” She bobbed her head to the music from the jukebox. Her bun loosened just a bit. “What? Why are you laughing?” she said.

  He described his life under Meg’s iron rules.

  “Poor Henry.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t—”

  “Really, Henry. She doesn’t sound human.”

  “No?”

  “More like a robot. Perfectly programmed.”

  Had he made her sound so bad? He hadn’t meant to. “She tried hard,” he said quickly. “She wanted things to be nice.”

  “Still,” Kate said. “Even so.”

  Uneasy (on Meg’s behalf?), he squirmed, ordered a second Coke.

  That early Saturday morning, back from her trip, Meg had looked entirely too human, Henry thought: pale, almost ill.

  In those first few minutes, when he’d tried to learn where she’d been, he’d said, “I even call
ed your office. They didn’t know anything.”

  “I didn’t tell them I was leaving,” Meg had said.

  “You just took off?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How will you explain your absence to your bosses?”

  “I’ll give them a reason they’ll be too embarrassed to challenge.” She’d thought for a moment. “I’ll tell them I had an abortion.”

  A mind like an instruction manual, Henry thought, full of tight little plans, even under pressure.

  Kate didn’t want the rest of the fries.

  They walked slowly back to her place in prickly, misty rain, bright from reflections of the buzzing curbside signs. On the sidewalk in front of the liquor store, near the stairs that led to her door, her bun finally unraveled, a shock, a gift, a festival of fragrance. “Kate,” Henry whispered, and kissed her.

  In bed she rubbed his thighs. He spread almond oil on her belly. “That’s wonderful,” she said. She closed her eyes. “My doctor says some women, when they’re pregnant, lose all interest in sex.”

  Henry tickled her navel, an oval bloom as delicate as that of his old girlfriend, Markie. “Yes?”

  “It hasn’t been true for me.”

  Fertile Kate! “I’m glad,” he said.

  “My breasts are a little sore. Go easy.”

  “How’s this?”

  “Mmmm.” She lay in his arms. “Henry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think you could do me a favor tomorrow?”

  He raised his head.

  “Can you drive me to the clinic? I have an appointment at two with my doctor. More tests.”

  He pictured his desk calendar. He could rearrange his meeting with the shoe man. “Sure.”

  “Henry?”

  He kissed her shoulder. “What?”

  “I know it’s probably a little soon to say this—”

  “Say it anyway.”

  “What’s going to happen with us?”

  He turned to face her. “Right now …” he said. “Right now, what’s going to happen is, you need to take good care of yourself. I’d like to help.”

  “Ben called me last night,” she said. “After you’d left. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “Oh?” His scrotum tightened.

  “I think it finally struck him,” Kate said. “He’s going to be a father whether he’s with me or not—and his daughter’s going to grow up without him.”

  Henry swallowed hard, surprised at the breadth of his panic, stunned by his commitment to this woman already. “Does he want to come back?” His voice shook.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he knows. I do think he’s having a fling. I mean, all the signs are there—”

  “Like you?”

  She reached for his hand. “This isn’t just a fling. I don’t know. I don’t know. There was a different tone in his voice—I think he misses me more than he thought he would.”

  Henry brushed her hair with his hands. “This is what made you so glum in the hamburger place, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged.

  “What do you want? I mean, with Ben?”

  Kate shook her head against his chest. Clearly, she was too upset to say more now.

  “Guess what,” Henry said swiftly then, smiling, trying to slam-dunk the lump in his throat. “Last night? Last night was my birthday.”

  “Wherever Your Heart Wanders,” said the magazine ad on his desk, “Pace Shoes Will Take You There in Comfort!” A couple, holding hands, ran through a meadow of poppies, wearing bright-yellow sneakers. If that’s the best they could do, Henry thought, it’s no wonder this lousy outfit cratered last quarter.

  He’d already spoken to Mr. Pace, rescheduling for tomorrow. Now, the receiver piped “The Way We Were” into the folds of his ear. The cellos swelled like tight little bags of microwave popcorn.

  Meg finally came on the line. “Larsen,” she said.

  “What can you do for sports shoes?”

  He thought he heard her smile. “Forget it. Nike’s cornered the market. How are you, Henry?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Splendid. What can I do for you? Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “Thanks. It’s sweet of you to remember.”

  “Do anything fun?” She almost sounded tender.

  “Actually, I forgot till the end of the day.”

  “And what’ve you forgotten now?”

  “Nothing. I was just calling to—”

  “Really, Henry. I’m busy.”

  “Well.” He hesitated. “You know that green recliner?”

  Instantly, the climate of her voice eroded a few degrees. “The green recliner. Yes. You can forget that too.” Icy, icy. “We settled this.”

  “Except—”

  “I forgot. Nothing’s ever settled with you, is it? It’s easier for me to become a virgin again than it is for you to make up your mind about something.”

  Same old edge. She might as well have nicked him in the lungs. “Can we not be nasty?” he wheezed. “I’ve got some things of yours—that old Cindy Crawford workout book—”

  “All right. I can’t talk, I’ve got a meeting now. How ‘bout Saturday at nine? If that doesn’t work, leave a message on my home machine. Bye, Henry.”

  A little detonation in his ear. Damn Barbra Streisand. And holding hands, he thought. Robert Redford too.

  The ob-gyn clinic was tucked away in the back of a strip shopping center south of Rice. It shared a parking lot with a CD store, a ski shop, and a Hallmark card outlet. How did the city get so ugly, so repeatedly convenient and bland? Henry thought, staring at the mud-brown walls, the windows full of dull and expensive merchandise.

  Closer now, he saw that the clinic’s parking spaces were blocked from the rest of the lot by thin wire mesh. Two men in leather coats guarded an opening in the fence. They waved him through, past a small, shouting crowd. “What’s all this?” Henry asked.

  Kate pointed to two young women thrusting their fists at the car. Their faces were red. “They call themselves the CALL Girls,” Kate said. ‘“Collegians Activated to Liberate Life.’ And that guy over there, see him? He’s always here. I swear, he never rests.” She nodded at a sallow man in a black turtle-neck sweater. “He’s down from Dallas, with the Advocates for Life Ministries. They’ve lectured me every time I’ve been here, though I’ve told them they’ve got the wrong girl.”

  Henry didn’t get it.

  “Abortions, Henry.”

  “Oh.” His fingers tingled on the steering wheel.

  One of the leather-coated men escorted them from the car to a door marked “Women’s Health Services” while his partner stood firm in front of the shouters. “Harlot!” Turtleneck screamed at Kate. “Murderess!”

  One of the women yelled, “Sister, stop, please! Abortions cause breast cancer! Turn back! It’s not too late!”

  Turtleneck rushed, and shook, the mesh. Kate grabbed Henry’s arm. “Don’t look their way. You’ll just encourage them.” He stumbled after her into a bright beige hallway with glass doors at the end. “Katie, why do you come here?” he asked, breathless. “Aren’t there safer places?”

  “I was referred to Dr. Beston once years ago, when she worked in the Medical Center, and I built a real trust with her,” Kate said calmly. “Last year she left her HMO. They’d adopted an anti-abortion policy—didn’t want the kind of trouble you just saw.”

  The glass doors opened and they moved into another drab space with white-tiled floors. “Dr. Beston partnered with some other doctors here. I followed her because I like her.”

  They turned a corner into a large, impersonal waiting room. Kate approached a receptionist sitting behind thick glass. The names of four gynecologists hung, on plastic strips, on the wall behind her. “Kate Moore for Dr. Beston,” she said. “I think she wants to do another ultrasound?”

  Henry sat in a hard chair by a table piled with magazines. Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Architectural Dig
est. A woman in an apron, hugged around the neck by a gap-toothed little girl, smiled at him from one of the shiny covers. A coffeemaker sat on another table nearby. Torn packets of Sweet ‘n Low lay crumpled around it, pink as his rent check envelopes.

  He wasn’t the only male in the room. A teenage boy sat on the edge of a couch holding a shaking young woman. “Laura, it’s all right. Laura,” he whispered. “Shhh.” Though they had their arms around each other, there was a space between them on the couch, as if, when this awful afternoon was over, they’d shove off instantly, away from each other. It probably all began with them in a hamburger joint, Henry thought, when a booth seat spilled them together.

  He looked away, embarrassed, at the posters on the walls: cutaway drawings of naked women, revealing intimate details of the uterus.

  “—you’d like?” Kate was saying.

  “Hm?”

  “Saturday night. Your belated birthday celebration. What do you want to do?”

  “Oh, stay in with you.”

  Two black women at the far end of the couch were trying to cheer themselves up. “So I says to him, I says, ‘God may have gave you sperm, stud britches, but he sure as hell didn’t give you no sense.’” They cracked up.

  The receptionist motioned to Kate. “Back in a flash,” Kate said, and squeezed his hand. She disappeared down another long hall.

  No one in this room can afford to purchase a CD player or a pair of ski boots, Henry thought sadly, checking their clothing and looks.

  “Laura, Dr. Simpson’s ready for you now,” the receptionist said. Laura jumped up, and straightened her blouse.

  Henry leafed through Good Housekeeping. A recipe for key lime pie, mascara comparison charts. He was aware of a man’s voice, from a room down the hall. “—nausea?”

  “A little,” a woman answered.

  “All right, I’m going to wipe this off. Breathe in for me now. Good.”

  Henry glanced at the teenage boy. He was rocking on the couch, gripping his head in his hands. Once, Meg had sat this way on the queen-sized bed she’d shared with Henry. He remembered the woolly heat of their room, the green recliner in the corner, the rotoring of crickets outside.