The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  Graham rubbed her behind on his way to the coffee pot. He filled a mug, twitched in a drop of creamer, and carried it to the living room. He was a gorgeous morning mess sitting on the couch in his loose, partially open blue robe, his wavy hair tousled from having been pressed against his pillow. In the gold dimness of Christmas lights, Graham’s lips looked full and dark, his eyes warm and focused on nothing but her face. He smiled his slow smile at her, and she drifted automatically to him and sat on his lap and kissed his neck.

  “Merry Christmas to me,” he said.

  “This is for me.”

  “It’s been months.”

  “This time, it has.”

  “I thought you stopped loving me again.”

  “I never did.”

  “Or, that you—Oh…That’s nice—that you, that you resented me. I’ve been thinking about that, you know, and I know it isn’t my fault, what we have here, but I’d understand—”

  “Kissing, Graham.”

  “Yes, I feel that. But, um, Katie, over—over the last few months you have to admit it’s been a little—”

  “My love.” Katherine stopped to look at him. “You are so handsome.”

  He wrapped his arms around her waist and looked up at her with the vulnerability of a virgin. “You haven’t said that in a long time.”

  “So handsome.” She pushed his hair away from his face and kissed him, and he said nothing else.

  In keeping with the uncharacteristic temperature pattern since the snow had begun, precipitation stopped soon after the sun came up. Roads cleared within an hour, and by mid-afternoon trees under sixty-degree sunshine dripped the last of their covering onto thin, white slush. Katherine drove to Margaret and Ernie’s with the AV on MANUAL to avoid any thick pockets that might pull the tires, a hazard her particular model had not been designed to sense.

  “We should probably do as much of that as we can in the next three months,” Graham said, tapping Katherine’s thigh. “Sex.”

  They passed a restored Victorian home with a sign out front reading NEWSOME LAW OFFICES. A figure in a gray winter coat lifted a blanketed baby carrier from a dry corner of the covered entry. Katherine watched in the rearview mirror as the woman, she saw now, stepped through slush to the sidewalk. She looked right and left before hollering something at the surrounding small, single-family A-frames.

  “Watch it!”

  Katherine’s body yanked against a hard correction when the car lurched left and missed sideswiping a van parked at the curb. Graham released the wheel to Katherine. She glanced again at the rearview mirror and saw the woman marching away with the carrier.

  “Nervous about seeing Margaret?”

  “Hm?”

  “It’s been a while,” he said.

  “What has?”

  “Since you’ve seen Margaret.”

  “Oh. Yes. It has. Why would that make me nervous?”

  He lifted his hands in a shrug and looked out the window. “What I meant before,” he said, “is that I get the feeling we won’t be having much of it after the baby. Sex.”

  Katherine turned onto the narrow country lane leading to Margaret’s forested estate and tapped the panel’s blue SELF DRIVE option. The road was clear and dry. Margaret and the dozen other homeowners who’d staked out private pieces of land to create their own separate, but not too isolated neighborhood had pitched in equal amounts for a solar powered snowmelt system. Katherine would have liked to have something like that to dry the roads in a circular mile surrounding the stores.

  “We can have as much or as little sex as we like,” she said.

  “Really!”

  “Not coitus, of course.”

  “Ah. See.”

  “Is it absolutely essential that there be penile penetration of my lower body?”

  “Nope.”

  Free to not watch the road, Katherine could focus entirely on Graham. He was not similarly focused on her, but on the passing trees, and then on a vast clearing with a white-tailed rabbit running through the snow’s scattered remains.

  She said, “Is it that important to you?”

  “Isn’t that Murphy?”

  “Is what—? Oh! I think so.”

  In what at first seemed a substantial distance from the rabbit, a shaggy gold dog bounded across the field. Within seconds he was a snout’s length from the dodging, flailing, leaping rabbit, its evasive movements so sharp and erratic that the dog lost all control, his front half moving one way before his back could catch up. He toppled and rolled, displacing enough wet, melting snow to create an impressive and violent spray. One quick flip and he was off again, this time seemingly anticipating every direction the rabbit might take—jerking right when the rabbit jerked right, jerking left when the rabbit jerked left—until the rabbit flung itself into the air and directly into the leaping dog’s open mouth.

  “There’s symbolism for you,” Graham said as Murphy pranced to the tree line, rabbit limp and dangling from its jaws.

  “It is that important, then,” Katherine said. “To you.”

  “I wish it were to you.”

  “Were I not susceptible to pregnancy, it would be.” The dog disappeared into a thick patch of evergreens marking the far edge of Margaret’s property. Katherine hoped to avoid being greeted by a blood covered Murphy. “But as an apparently fertile female,” she said, “what is important to you has, for me, become a decadent luxury not without lasting side-effects.”

  Graham turned to her with a closed-lipped smile. “I understand.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Why on earth would you blame me?”

  “We did have a good amount of pregnancy-free sex before that little slip in Austria, but I guess I completely understand why you’d never want to have sex ever, ever again.”

  “Sex is fine, Graham, and plenty of it, but not—”

  “Not the good kind. I get it.”

  “Do you want a divorce?”

  He laid his hand on the back of hers. “No.”

  Katherine turned her palm to lace their fingers. They sat that way until the car parked itself in front of Margaret’s intentionally rustic wood mansion trimmed in large, colored bulbs.

  Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas” and four flickering red candles did little to mitigate the awkwardness between Katherine and Margaret. “How do you like the salad dressing?” and “What does Murphy do with the rabbits once he catches them?” were the best efforts each managed over salad before transforming themselves into politely smiling dullards. Between bites of garden greens, they nodded and made feminine noises of encouragement at the men’s conversation about daily liquor store operations and the challenges of renovating timeworn structures.

  To be fair, neither Katherine nor Margaret had ever had much to add to Ernie’s construction stories, and Katherine hardly expected Margaret to contribute anything now. Although Margaret carried the bulk of the financial burden of Ernie’s renovation projects, they were his personal philanthropic endeavor, an idea he had brought to Margaret after he received a phone call from a woman pregnant with her second unexpected child. Ernie had taken Margaret with him to see just where she hoped to add a small room to her trailer.

  “I couldn’t imagine one more person living in there,” Margaret had said. “Who knows how many more could be on the way?”

  From that point forward, Margaret’s sole and deliberately chosen role, aside from showing her genuine interest, had been providing Ernie with the money he needed to build, money that rarely returned to them once the homes went to their new owners. (Ernie and Margaret had agreed they would accept whatever the recipients could give, whether all cash, some cash, traded services, or gifts. A self-published author—“He’s wonderful,” Margaret said—sent Margaret a new novel every six months. Ernie displayed a helmet from the final Super Bowl on a shelf in the living room. One homeowner, a knitter, had sent socks, blankets, pot holders, toilet seat covers, and, when he lear
ned Margaret was pregnant, a little yellow hat.)

  Katherine, for her part, had historically participated in, if not led, conversations about her liquor stores, but tonight she sat in obedient silence. Ordinarily, if Ernie directed a store-related question at Graham, she would interject or at least playfully remind Ernie that she was the authority on the subject. Tonight, for now, she let it pass (each time tamping down increasing surges of perfectly legitimate resentment). After all, Graham was deeply involved in the day to day running of the business and could reasonably claim some ownership.

  More challenging was to pretend to not notice that Graham chose not to invite Katherine’s insight when the answers to Ernie’s questions were beyond Graham’s knowledge or experience. She controlled her temper by listening for the bells on the cuffs of Ernie’s and Margaret’s Christmas shoes. Ernie’s would jingle when he shifted or bounced his feet, but Margaret’s seemed to express her own frustration with Graham. When faced with a question or led into a subject area that was Katherine’s forte, Margaret’s bells would jingle at Katherine not being consulted. “Say, how did you get the banks on your side, anyway?” Bells. “What kind of price negotiating can you do?” Bells. “You’re really doing all right for yourselves, which I guess I wouldn’t have expected from a liquor store. What are your margins? If you don’t mind me asking.” Bells, bells, bells.

  When Margaret could clearly take no more, she interrupted Ernie and jabbed her finger at Katherine, but Katherine stopped her short by asking for a fresh glass of water with some ice and only smiled at Margaret’s manipulated eyebrows.

  Had she and Margaret been talking over the past months, all it would have taken was mouthing the word “coitus” to explain Graham’s behavior and Katherine’s (frankly, remarkable) tolerance. Margaret would have known about Katherine’s aversion to traditional intercourse and would have guessed that she and Graham had finally had the conversation. But Katherine had shared only news clippings, so Margaret knew nothing about Katherine’s life since their visit to the Eighth Street Clinic, and Katherine knew equally little about Margaret. Including why she seemed more concerned than Katherine thought necessary when Ernie mentioned vandalism at one of his work sites. It was a foreign and miserable sensation to feel that asking about it would be prying.

  “Anyway, enough about my little problems. Glasses up!” Ernie raised his drink. “You’re here to celebrate Christmas, but we also wanted you to help us celebrate the sale—‘s’cuse me, ‘s’cuse me, the acquisition—of Mox’s latest novel, Elmore and Lenore Steal the Light. Cheers to my brilliant and successful author wife!”

  The men tapped their liquor to the women’s water glasses. Katherine tried to catch Margaret’s eye to congratulate her, but Margaret smiled past her.

  Ernie slid back his chair with a vague announcement about waking up the bird and went to the kitchen, his shoe bells jangling a path around the breakfast bar.

  “Margret,” Katherine said. “Congratulations.” She lifted a wide spinach leaf to her mouth. Salad dressing flicked onto her cheek. “I had no idea.” She looked at her place setting, but there was no napkin. She used her hand.

  Margaret indicated a missed spot of oil by touching the side of her chin. “You don’t want to talk about babies.”

  “But this is your book,” Katherine said, the ball of her palm dragging oil across her jaw.

  “Oh, no,” Ernie called from the kitchen. “You can’t separate that,” he said, wiggling a finger over the breakfast bar at Margaret’s pregnancy, “from those names. She won’t even find out what sex it is. Doesn’t want to know either Elmore or Lenore won’t make it. I told her if she has a boy, she should just kill off that one in the story, and vice-a versa. You know, so the one that doesn’t make it in real life gets to live on, in a way.”

  “Hey. Hey.” Graham leaned forward on the table, sliding his drink to sustain its ideal proximity to his mouth. “What a—I have it. Idea. Say you two have one sex, and we have the other sex. No problem! You take ours.”

  “Graham.”

  “We’re giving it away, anyway.”

  “Graham.”

  “Katherine?”

  “I didn’t know,” Margaret said.

  Ernie carried in a platter loaded with an uncarved goose. He set it at the end of the table and demonstrated his expertise with a battery operated carving knife. With Graham both intoxicated and distracted by Ernie’s bone sawing, Katherine murmured over the table to Margaret that it had been a last-minute decision.

  “By the way,” Katherine nearly whispered, “did you find any of the articles interesting?”

  “They were all—”

  “In particular,” Katherine raised her eyebrows, “the batch including the clippings about the toy stores. And the miscarriage laws.”

  “I…That was so long ago. I’m not sure I…”

  “What’s that?” Graham said. “Which stories?”

  “Did you know,” Katherine said loudly, “the government has begun rationing all fruits, vitamins, spices, seasonings, and over the counter medications with the slightest potential, mythical or otherwise, to induce miscarriage? As if a woman’s temptation to attempt such a thing would persist in the face of a life sentence.” She looked at Margaret over the rim of her water glass.

  “Sure do!” Ernie set out the carved portions on a new plate. “Moxie read about it on some writer’s forum. No rationing alcohol, though. Lawmakers like it too much, I guess. I tell you what, I had a hell of a time getting parsley. Three places—all sold right out! And you can’t get the full bunch, anymore, either. They quarter the suckers.”

  Margaret glanced at the section of table hiding Katherine’s middle. “Oh, I see.” During Ernie’s insistence that everyone load their plates, she mouthed, “I’m so sorry.”

  Katherine took a bite of goose. Oil dripped down her chin, and she remembered she had no napkin. She checked Graham’s place setting, and then Ernie’s and Margaret’s. No one had napkins. She used her hand the best she could and wiped it on the overlap of the tablecloth.

  “All these laws, you know,” Ernie said with a full fork hovering in front of his mouth. “They don’t affect me and Mox, but you’d figure everyone else who’s worried would do that fucking thing. Right? Why not?”

  Katherine had opted to not think about fucking, nor to think about Graham thinking about fucking. She wedged herself out of her chair and hunted for napkins. “But fucking is so dangerous,” she said lightly, her back turned. “Right, Graham?”

  Margaret said after a sip of water, “I agree with Kat. It’s not so easy to find someone. It isn’t like they wear nametags saying ‘infertile’ or ‘sterile.’ And even if they did, how could you ever be sure?”

  Chewing, Graham said, “What do you mean, it doesn’t affect you? You having more?”

  “No,” Margaret said.

  “Ah, so no ‘coitus’ for you, either. Poor bastards. Cheers.” He slammed his glass against Ernie’s.

  “No coitus!” Ernie laughed and shook his head.

  Katherine closed the sideboard drawer. Only placemats there. She moved to the bar.

  Graham leaned into Ernie. “You mean you’re keeping having sex?”

  “Yeah, we’re keeping having sex. You’re not?”

  Graham waved a hand at Katherine’s abdomen. “Not once that’s done.”

  “Graham,” Katherine smiled, “please stop drinking.”

  “I’ve had two, Katie. All’s well.” He winked.

  Katherine opened the bar’s bottom cabinet. She found a short stack of cloth napkins among an ice bucket, swizzle sticks, cocktail shaker, and an assortment of corkscrews. In the top napkin’s bottom right corner, an infant in a red and green striped diaper crawled along a straight-line surface, the red diaper stripe trailing behind to spell, in one case, Graham. Beneath his, Ernie, Margaret, and Katherine. She also saw, tucked far back, a bottle of Graham’s (and Katherine’s) favorite pinot noir. She pulled it out and looked at Margaret. Mar
garet snapped her eyes away. Katherine took out the napkins and the wine, closed the door, and brought everything to the table.

  “Found it, huh?” Ernie said. “Yeah, sorry about that. I got it from one of your competitors so it’d be a surprise for Graham, but Mox didn’t want to tempt you.”

  “Oh, damn it, Ernie,” Margaret said.

  Graham swallowed the last of his drink. “No drinking and no coitus make Katie a dull Jamaica girl. I know people say penetration isn’t everyth—”

  “Graham.”

  “—ing, but you don’t really, really miss it until you can’t even talk about it, anymore.”

  Katherine picked up Graham’s glass and tipped it against her lips for the taste of a single drop. With Margaret watching, she put down the glass and uncorked the wine.

  Margaret said, “You’re still going to Jamaica? That’s wonderful. How long did you have to postpone?”

  Katherine said there had been no need to postpone. She had a C-section scheduled for bright and early at six o’clock on the thirteenth, allowing for a full week of recovery before their flight. Every obstetrics website she’d consulted, she said while pouring a glass of wine “for Graham, of course,” had suggested a week was more than enough.

  “I’m confused.” Graham held the stem of the full pour Katherine had set in front of him. “Stop drinking or drink more?”

  Katherine took the glass from him and had a small sip, but slowly, because Margaret’s hand started moving toward her on the table and she wanted to see how far it would slide in what seemed to be an unconscious reflex. When Katherine set down the wine, the twitching fingers relaxed after having crept all the way to the holly-leaf centerpiece. Margaret shifted in her chair, blinked, ate a bite of goose, and wiped her mouth with the top napkin. The Graham baby fluttered over her hand.