The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  Katherine stepped into the store, her stooped shoulders and manipulated coat an automatic reflex. Graham was laughing in the entry with the man offering IPA samples while Curtis smiled at the counter through orange, two-day stubble as he slammed bottle after bottle of sauvignon blanc into a paper bag for Sauvignon Blanc George. As one of the town’s few plows for hire, Sauvignon Blanc George always managed to make his regular visits to one or both of the Oxford locations.

  “…only kind of abortion I can get behind, is all I’m saying,” Sauvignon Blanc George bellowed with a look around for shows of approval. “Though, it’s too bad she had to take that baby with her. If she’d ‘a’ waited ‘til she popped before jumping in front of that train, at least she’d ‘a’ done something of value with her life, know what I mean?”

  “I guess kids today just don’t have any common sense,” Curtis said. Slam.

  “Hey, you break it, you bought it.” Sauvignon Blanc George guffawed, snorted, and again looked around. Katherine turned away before he could see her body or catch her eye. “And listen, now, fourteen is hardly a ‘kid,’ if you know what I mean.” He bumped his pelvis against air, laughed again, paid Curtis, and scooped up his bag. “You know they’ve got some that age putting themselves out for fucking?” He leaned over the counter and lowered his voice to something just below a shout. “Hey, you know anything about, uh, how to get in on that? My woman’s been wearing a ‘closed for service’ sign on her pussy since the ban.”

  Curtis yelled, “Hey, anyone here know any teenage girls on the fucking circuit looking for a thirty-three-year-old?” He tsked himself. “Aw, shit, sorry, George. I should’ve asked. Is a teenager good, or did you want something a little youn—”

  Sauvignon Blanc George shielded his face with his free arm and dashed out to the parking lot.

  “I don’t feel right about taking his money, Ms. Oxford,” Curtis said.

  “The man has a drinking problem, Curtis,” she said. “Would you rather someone else get paid for helping to destroy him?”

  Curtis tore the plastic wrapping from a case of miniatures. “Hell, no.”

  With no one left in the store, Katherine called Graham and Curtis to a meeting she had planned while in the truck. Together, ideally, they would generate a list of customers that included their places of residence and take shifts clearing access to their neighborhoods.

  Unfortunately, because most of their patrons had had no reason to share where they lived, the list was short.

  One regular whose absence Curtis noted was Absolut Meredith, whose first visit and a demand for vodka had immediately followed a divorce and her move to an “I guess it’s fine, right?” apartment. While ringing her up on a day she had only meant to check the bourbon supply, Katherine had fixated on the spidery knots in Absolut Meredith’s long, red hair, and then on her tense jaw and faded red lips. There had been something about Absolut Meredith’s, “Hi, how are you?” as she set down her 1.75 liter jug that had compelled Katherine to walk around the counter and pull the woman into her arms and hold her until she cried. Afterward, Katherine had rung her up and given her a lemon lollipop from Curtis’s jar behind the counter. She had been a regular ever since.

  Graham said, “Maybe she doesn’t need the vodka, anymore.”

  “Oh?” Katherine said.

  “You haven’t been around to see it, but she smiles, now. She has a…it’s disarming. A downright disarming smile, when she uses it.” He smiled, himself.

  “Yes, well, Graham, since Absolut Meredith is probably not our only West Tinytown customer, we should probably clear the roads from here to there, either way,” Katherine said before urging the meeting “forward and more useful, please.”

  “‘We’ will clear nothing, love of my life,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” He rubbed the small of her back and, when she tried to argue, said he would hear no arguments. (She argued nonetheless and insisted she would have a shift every bit as long as anybody else’s.)

  Six-Pack Tyrone, a twenty-two-year-old professional dog trainer with his first television show and a new house in Haverton, had also not been seen in some time.

  “He’s right there,” Graham said, and sure enough, Tyrone walked through the door, smiled at the three standing at the counter, and stopped to sample the IPA.

  “The last, then, is Prospect,” Katherine said, holding her coat away from herself, but closed.

  Oxford I’s Eight-Nips-a-Night Victoria lived six miles away in Prospect. Weather permitting, she drove a motorized bicycle into Tinytown to work in the cannabis fields. She never said more than “Hello” and “Thank you,” but Katherine knew she lived in Prospect from the driver’s license she had once left face-up on the counter.

  Curtis said that if they were considering Prospect just for Eight-Nips-a-Night Victoria, “don’t bother.” Victoria had stopped visiting Oxford months ago, he said. “She’s probably had the kid by now, though, now that I think about it.”

  “Prospect, then,” Katherine said.

  After the meeting, Katherine followed Graham out to the truck and kissed him goodbye, just catching the corner of his mouth before he stepped up to his seat.

  “Graham.”

  He dropped the remote key in the empty ashtray and looked down at her. His hair had grown longer and messier. His bangs touched his eyelashes, making his eyes appear much bluer, somehow. He looked so devastatingly beautiful she was suddenly afraid, as she had never been before, of losing him. Or, she thought as she stood beside the truck, maybe a fear of losing him made him more beautiful. This was something she would have to think about, because it suddenly seemed important to know the diff—

  “Something you need, love of mine?” he said.

  Katherine studied his smile. He held it steady. She said, “Is that real?”

  “Is what real?”

  She mimicked his expression with only a little exaggeration. She let it sit on her face until he turned away and started the truck.

  “Something is happening, Graham.”

  He scratched his neck. Without looking at her, he reached across the passenger seat to open the door. Katherine wrapped her coat against the curious eyes of an approaching customer as she walked around the front of the truck and climbed inside. Graham pulled out of the parking lot while taking her hand and bringing it to his lap. He slid it between his legs, and she let it stay there, not entirely still, until he parked at a snowy dead end on the outskirts of the cannabis farm. He helped Katherine lower and remove her pants before removing his own, and then he helped her get to her hands and knees before sliding in behind her.

  “Not too deep,” she said.

  “I know.”

  He started slowly, carefully. The sensation paralyzed her. His hands slid down her back, the intimate gentleness of it weakening her elbows. His fingers slipped to her sides. She stiffened. He caressed her stomach. She stopped moving.

  “Graham.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  She was preparing to push him off, but then one of his hands took control of a hip and the other reached around and down.

  While stopped at a red light on the return trip to the store, he said, “Just so you know, I think it’s beautiful.”

  She said nothing. A bundled-up man with a suitcase hurried across the intersection in front of them, and something flashed in the corner of her eye. A small stuffed animal had dropped from somewhere and bounced on the shoveled sidewalk. Katherine searched until she spotted a little girl wailing in an open second story window.

  “Your pregnancy,” Graham said, and the light turned green. “I think it’s beautiful.”

  She shifted in her seat, but there was no way to be comfortable. “I know you do.”

  “What’s so wrong with that? Why do you get…?” He reached over and touched her hair. “Do you feel unattractive?”

  “Why on earth would I feel unattractive?”

  “I don’t know, Katie, that’s what I’m—”

 
; “I feel pregnant, and I look pregnant.”

  “And it’s beautiful. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, and my point, Graham, is that the aesthetics of pregnancy are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. How I look is a simple conse-quence of the condition. Do you understand?—I only ask because I genuinely want to know.”

  “Sure, Katie!”

  Katherine slid down in the seat to unfold her pelvis. “I feel none of the things you expect me to feel,” she said. “That this ends in a week is a relief. Nothing else.” She pressed her lips together tight to steady them. Snow piles on the sidewalks passed in blurs of dirty brown. Katherine took deep, even breaths until she could speak. “It terrifies me that you might hate me because of it.”

  He looked at her. “Don’t you use you and me and hate in the same sentence ever again, do you hear me?” He pulled into Oxford II’s parking lot and set the brake. “Katie, do you hear me?”

  Katherine slid close and tucked herself under his arm. The clean scent of his deodorant clung to his shirts even after he washed them. She pressed against him and closed her eyes.

  Graham said, “I think I’m going to fuck Absolut Meredith.”

  She looked up at him, but his attention was on the sky. He squinted at it.

  “When?”

  He rubbed her arm rapidly, up and down. “Oh, not now! Not until later,” he said. “After. And not because I don’t love you.” He smiled down at her.

  Her reflexive need to fully possess him nauseated her. She said, “Punishment.”

  “No, damn it, Katie. Don’t you know what love is?”

  She asked him if he loved Absolute Meredith.

  “She’s infertile,” he said. Matter-of-fact. That was all there was to it, he said. Nothing more. “So, see? Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Does she know you plan to approach her about fucking?”

  “Katie, it’s—Listen, now, it’s nothing. Nothing! You had your new condition that you introduced, and this is mine. I think it more than meets both of our physical needs. And it’s fair. It’s fair to both of us. You see, don’t you?”

  She did see. She liked nothing about it (although, it did relieve some pressure, which she appreciated), but it was fair, just as he said. Even so, she felt nauseated and possessive and incomprehensibly sad. She tucked herself deeper under his arm.

  He reached around her shoulder and stuck a finger in her eye.

  “Ow.”

  He laughed. “I’m sorry! Oh, Katie. Did I hurt you?” He tried again.

  Her cheek tickled under the warm fingertips stroking her hair away from her face.

  “You know,” he said, “I can’t imagine living my life without you, Katherine Daisy Oxford. But I could if I had to.”

  She lifted his arm off her shoulder. “I should hope so.” As she slid away, she told him not to forget Prospect.

  Katherine shoved through the liquor store doors and slipped past the beer sample man (Curtis had arranged the whole thing, and Katherine neither knew the man’s name nor cared at this moment to learn it). She squeezed between the wine racks on the way to the office to get her keys, spotted a bottle on a low shelf with its label face down, and stopped to correct it. She bent over and bumped the bottles behind her. She tried to kneel and bumped them again. She sweated in her coat. The store was much too warm.

  “Curtis!”

  He rushed over.

  She said, “What temperature are we running?”

  “Sixty-eight.”

  Sixty-eight was correct. “It feels warm.”

  “I checked it first thing. Always do.”

  “Have any customers complained about the narrowness of these aisles?”

  “Uh…I don’t know. Maybe. You know. People complain about every-thing.”

  “When are you doing something about it?”

  “When? They’re regulation. I can’t make changes every time someone complains about something. What if someone comes in and says the low shelves are too low or the high shelves are too high? What would we do with all those bottles?”

  “Has anyone complained about that?”

  “No. But Ms. Oxford, the aisles have been like this in both stores since they opened. You never said anything before.—Oh,” he said, his gaze on the roundness pushing past the panels of her open coat. “Oh. I mean, yeah. I mean, I could—”

  Katherine pushed past him. “Never mind, Curtis. Thank you.”

  She tried not to look like she was hurrying. She dusted a bottle at the end of the aisle with a swipe of her fingers and nudged a stack-display beer case with her hip to align it with the others. When she reached the office, she forced herself to open the door delicately and close it quietly behind her.

  The lights were off in the wood paneled room, the dull sky turning it darker.

  The air smelled like him.

  His chair was pushed in the way it always was when he would be gone for the rest of the day.

  She stood rigid in front of the desk, afraid to breathe.

  Graham laughed out from the picture in the frame.

  Katherine well remembered the day the Brazilian tourist had taken it for them. Before struggling up the hill (with several pauses to rest their legs), she and Graham had sampled Dampfknödel from a bakery on the Hauptstrasse and made love in their room overlooking the Marktplatz. They had been happy.

  She faced the picture away.

  Her lungs forced a deep breath, and her stomach moved against her shirt. With every successive inhale and exhale, the material rubbed as irritating as cotton on a sunburn.

  She pinched a gathering and held it away from her skin.

  She stared out the window, at the grays and the purples crashing in the clouds, and willed the scream to dissolve.

  SEVEN

  Katherine woke on the morning of her C-section appointment to Graham’s mouth breathing inches from her nose, his lips in a carefree smile.

  She used to like to know everything about the absurd stories created by his sleeping imagination. More recently, she had suspicions about what he might be pursuing in the dark freedom of his private recesses and tried not to wonder about his dreams.

  With an hour, still, before her alarm would go off, she bounced out of bed and started a shower.

  To reduce the risk of infection they had recommended she not shave herself, but she refused to have a stranger come at her pubic hair as if she were some overbreeding cat brought in for spaying. She guided the razor blindly, stroking wider than she normally might, and lower than usual, too, while trying not to make herself look completely ridiculous. At what felt like a nick, she whipped open the curtain and ran dripping to the mirror. She cleared a low circle in the fog and stood on her toes to lift her pelvis above the counter, then turned from side to side, looking for blood. A watery red line snaked its way down to what was left of her pubic hair. She rubbed it away, and no new blood appeared. Their curt instructions had been without an explanation of exactly how shaving could lead to infection, but she assumed cutting herself might be one way to do it.

  She lowered herself on her heels. The taut roundness of her middle now completely filled the circle in the fog.

  Had she just killed herself?

  Not once—until now—had she seriously considered the possibility that she would die that afternoon.

  She closed her eyes to shut out her image, to pretend nothing was as it was, but that only pulled her inward, her consciousness diving into the arms and legs and cord and blood scheduled for removal. Her head tingled and pricked with panic and she mentally grasped for a way out, a way back, a way to undo it all.

  A dream came to mind, a nightmare she had had after learning she was pregnant.

  She was pressed flat to a skyscraper’s roof, the tar cool and smooth against her cheek and the palms of her hands. Her arms and legs were spread for balance, but inconceivably strong winds still inched her, bit by bit, toward the edge. When for a second they died down, she adjusted her gri
p, creating a pocket for a sudden gust to fill. Its brutal force lifted her and rolled her over the side, and as she plummeted through darkness, the distance to the bottom a mystery, she worked frantically through her options for survival: If she steered herself into bushes, they would break her fall. If she landed on her side, her shoulder and arm would protect her ribs and organs.

  But her sleeping mind ultimately conceded to logic. Katherine would fall until she hit the ground and died.

  This moment felt very much like that.

  The tingling in her head worsened. She could see nothing, feel nothing but such penetrating fear of death that she believed the fear alone would kill her.

  This was not what she wanted to feel on her day of freedom.

  She got back in the shower, hoping a return to practical tasks would be calming, but the hot, confined, beige space only scared her more. She turned off the water, leaped out, wrapped herself in a towel, and cleared a streak across the window so she could see the living, moving world outside.

  A white airplane glow floated through the dark sky.

  Fresh feet of overnight snow spread smooth and gray under the half moon.

  A window in the distance turned yellow with the lighting of a lamp.

  She might die that afternoon, yes. More likely was that she would leave the hospital and return to the life she had been enjoying before accepting that her period was two weeks late. This day, the day she had once thought would never come, was here.

  The relief hit her with such force that it took tasting the salt on her lips to know she was crying.

  She started another shower, stepped in, and leaned against the cool wall.

  She would pack a bottle of wine in her bag.