“It will be very funny,” he said, humorlessly, and Emi knew not to question this tone. The instinct rose from her gut, a silvery impulse that flashed, like a mother’s warning.
There was one, much younger, boy at the park, who did not ride on the track but pedaled aimlessly between the swings, once placing the front wheel at the base of the slide, timidly, as if contemplating a trick. Neil led Emi to a pyramid made from truck tires, the kind that Emi had never been able to climb as a child, due to the hot odor of rubber and the way it had leaked into her palms. As they crawled inside, she found the smell of the rubber to be less potent, was worried instead by frequent breezes that stirred up the alleyway odors, and, without the direct sunlight to warm them, the cold. Neil placed an arm around her, while his other hand found the hem of her shirt, her stomach, the tight band of her bra, which stopped his progress momentarily. They could see the wheels of the boy’s bicycle, as it appeared in one circle of light and then the next and then disappeared. The tip of Neil’s tongue was in her ear, dipping into that grooved space that, from Emi’s perspective, seemed to lose all sense of depth; the tongue might as well have been inside her brain. She did not know where her boyfriend had got such an idea, but she liked that he knew how to keep himself busy. It was an important quality. His teeth came down onto her earlobe. Then stopped. There was a whisper. “Is it happening?”
Both his hands inside her bra now, grabbing, pinching.
“Is it happening?” Neil’s eyes were fixed on her. “Are you dissociating?”
Emi didn’t understand the question, thought at first that he was asking if she had orgasmed and had no idea where to begin in her explanation of how such a thing would be accomplished. A certain book came to mind that her mother had given to her when she was nine. It was titled How to Prepare for Your Womanly Body, which she had thought was poorly worded and had shelved, reluctantly, next to a book called Your New Guinea Pig.
A face appeared in one of the tire circles then. It was the boy, off his bicycle now.
“You guys got any gum?” he asked them, oblivious to what he had interrupted.
They shook their heads.
“Me neither,” he said, then opened his mouth to reveal a pulpy green ball on the flat of his tongue. “I’m just pretending that this old grape skin is gum.” The boy disappeared again.
Neil, who seemed to have forgotten his question, blew on his hands, so that they would be warmer for pinching, Emi supposed. She was relieved when they were interrupted again, not by the boy, but by a voice from outside.
“Boss!” it cried. “Come home!”
Emi ducked away from Neil and crawled through the closest tire, back into the sunlight. She brushed the gravel from her knees and walked toward the swing set, where Maxie was teetering on the center swing, kicking her legs beneath her. Emi noticed how underdressed she was, the goose bumps visible across her bare arms. How truly old she looked without her lipstick.
“Let’s find someplace else.” Neil had appeared from the tire pyramid. He tugged at Emi’s sleeve. “Jim said we could use his basement if we were desperate.” Emi turned to him, interested in this new admission to desperation, wanting to find the evidence in his face. It looked the same as always: hungry, yellowish. She leaned in to kiss him, but he flinched.
“What?” she said. “I thought you liked being watched.”
Neil’s eyes flashed at Maxie, then back to Emi. He shook his head. “Gross,” he said, and Emi understood. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
The sun was low, behind them now, reflected gold by the windows of a small brick factory behind the park fence. This last flare of light, Emi noticed, made the smokestacks look more solid. Chiseled, as if into the sky. Another breeze blew up, scattering leaves. Maxie shivered on her swing and Emi wished that she could go to her, drape her sweater over those fleshy, goose-pimpled shoulders, tell her that Boss was coming home.
“I know her” was all that Emi could say, although it wasn’t exactly true. She stepped away, squinting into the hard light, the bricks. She was thinking about Catherine. Catherine had been good enough to hold Emi’s hand that day, as they walked from Mr. Albus’s classroom to the nurse—the nurse who would not have the words for what had happened, who would, seeing Emi’s tears, ask, again and again, which one of them was pregnant. If they had ever held hands in their life, they could not remember and so had no experience when it came to letting go, once their hands became hot and uncomfortable. Catherine and Emi made it to the nurse’s office this way, holding fast, not because they were friends, but because they were stubborn and liked to prove people wrong. They liked hard work. They had once built a boat from three inner tubes, two snow shovels, and the contents of a scrap pile, and had kept it afloat against the odds.
If Tooth Could Mean Heart
When the pain in Helen’s stomach began, her parents were concerned. They drove her to the emergency room, where the doctors could find nothing wrong. “Pain is common in pregnancy,” they told her in apologetic, disparaging tones. But just to be safe, Helen was ordered an ultrasound. In a dark room, on a swimming, silvery screen, she was shown the parts of her baby. A thigh bone, a kidney, the fish mouth of the heart. The baby slipped in and out of the shadows, as if trying to keep its face above water. A drowning, living thing.
“Your baby is healthy,” the obstetrician said, as if that solved it. So Helen went to her primary care doctor. She told him about the pain in her stomach, how it woke her at night, coming and going in strange, debilitating spells. It wasn’t like a knife, as she had heard people describe excruciating pain, but rather a rebuke, a rogue part of her. The doctor took this news unceremoniously.
“Some women experience pain differently than others,” he told her. He put his glasses back on and studied her form. By then, she was large, carrying the child far out in front, like a lengthwise watermelon. She often felt embarrassed by this, as if her stomach were somehow indecent, with its brown stripe, the creeping hairs. As if she could not just be modestly pregnant like every other woman. She hated how the lower part of her stomach plunged through the elastic band on her pants, drooping, like a cabbage hanging out of a grocery bag. And now, with this pain—pain itself, she was beginning to understand, was not good enough. You could not call a doctor’s office and say, “I have pain.” You had to be specific. It seemed that doctors were waiting for something very specific, the red flag that only they had the training to recognize. Helen knew of a famous playwright who had died of a heart attack. His only symptom had been a severe toothache. He had been following his wife to the car, on his way to the dentist, when he fell down dead. It seemed to Helen that if tooth could mean heart, then perhaps she needed to change her strategy.
“My ears are killing me,” she told the doctor.
This was not working.
She had developed a somewhat embarrassing way to cope with the spells. It worked in the middle of the night, when she was alone, soaked in sweat. “There now,” she’d say, “it’s not so bad. You’ll be better in no time.” It was a part of herself that she did not recognize, this cooing voice, this pitiful little person, like a very old woman trying to comfort a dead cat. “You’re a good girl,” she’d say. “Hush now.”
She remembered, as a child, the first time she became conscious of her heartbeat, a vexed hammering in her neck. She had shut herself into the bathroom, sat on the closed toilet lid, and pressed her finger to it, as if staving off a flood. Up until that day, she had believed in her own anatomy in the same way she believed in the continents on the map, the same way she had pretended to understand the constellations in the sky: with an abstract obedience. The discovery of her heart—or rather the acknowledgment of it—was an uncomfortable surprise. It meant that she was full of pieces, just like everyone else.
Her friend Eliza had two children already and so she knew about pain.
“That baby is going to have to come out,” she said. “Things are only going to get worse.”
; Eliza’s youngest son had been born on the toilet, two months too early. Her only warnings of labor had been a twinge that morning, in her thighs, which she had dismissed as soreness from her yoga class. Then, when the stomach pains began, she blamed the Indian food and settled into the bathroom with a book. The baby had had to be incubated, and they had been told to prepare for the worst. Helen had seen the photographs from this time, shots taken in black and white: a wrinkled toe, a little mushroom face beneath a hat. The photographer had captured the size of the baby’s wrist by sliding his father’s wedding band over it. Despite the worry, the long, sleepless hours in the NICU, Eliza seemed to embrace the celebrity it brought. The heroism of giving birth at home, of mistaking childbirth for a bowel movement. Not just anybody could do that.
Helen had gotten herself in to see a specialist. She was led to an examining room and told to change into a very short paper gown, which, with the addition of her large belly, fit more like an oversized T-shirt. She sat for a long time, eyeing various long, invasive-looking instruments set up along the counter, feeling cold, apprehensive. The doctor came in. He was a white-haired man who sat on a low stool so that he was eye level to a part of the gown that fit the most awkwardly. He had a list of questions, he said, and he began to read, without looking up.
“Vomiting,” he said, as if it were a very formal statement, like the beginning of a sermon. “Nausea,” to which Helen answered, “No. Not since the first trimester.” At this the doctor glanced up and seemed to notice her situation for the first time, his eyebrows raised, like a doctor who is interested in looking at an especially good wound. He wanted to know if sexual intercourse had become painful.
“I’m single,” Helen said. She felt like a troublesome student, compelled to give a disruptive although correct answer. She thought about her ex-boyfriend, Julian, about his wide, dewy eyes. The doctor wanted to know if Helen had any history of mental illness. Helen studied his face, as he looked at her over his glasses—a sharp, elderly look, like a professor about to speak his mind, candidly, before a classroom. But the doctor did not speak.
The day before, Eliza had invited her over, made her herbal tea that smelled like lawn clippings, and then offered to be her birth partner.
“It’s not just hand-holding,” she said. “You need someone who is going to be straight with you.”
Eliza had just finished telling her the story of a woman who’d given birth in the elevator of the hospital.
“At least I didn’t do that,” Eliza had said, as if the woman’s act had been disgraceful—and not only that, but less desirable than having a baby on the toilet. Helen had heard many of these stories from Eliza: a woman who had given birth in her pant leg, who had to have the material cut carefully away so that the baby—a sticky, pearish lump—could be extracted safely; or the fifty-year-old woman who thought that her growing belly was cancer. Eliza had become obsessed with these stories, with these dopey women, who could not figure out childbirth.
“It’s going to hurt like hell,” she said.
Helen left her appointment with the specialist feeling dull and misunderstood. In the end, there had been no need for the paper gown. No tests were performed. The doctor had set his clipboard down and given her a number to call. A therapist, he told her, and for the first time he had looked at her kindly, lifted his hand as if to touch her belly, then pulled it back. He shook her hand. Outside, the air was cool, windy, smelling like melting snow and exhaust from the parking lot. Helen could hear the humming of the hospital, the distant whoosh of the highway. She walked toward the bus stop, pulling her sweater around her belly. The baby was moving with an abrupt, liquid pressure, both aggravated and sweet. She thought about how Julian had put his hands on her stomach, poked at her jeans between her legs in a childish display of curiosity and love. Julian was flawed, but he was also tiresomely earnest. If he were here, Helen thought, he would try his best to understand. He would do everything to understand.
She found Julian at his apartment, blinking in his doorway, as though he had just woken up. He seemed very mysterious, standing there without his shirt—not quite a stranger, but a newer version of himself, a gaunt maturity having overtaken him, it seemed, since she had last seen him. He invited her in with awkward formality and offered her a chair at the small kitchen table. She was about to speak, a rehearsed little speech about why she had left him and why she had come back, when the pain returned—that terrible, defiant throbbing in her gut. She slumped forward in her chair and felt Julian’s arms around her, trying to hold her up.
“Hey,” he was saying. “Hey now,” like a quiet, grateful, bewildered admonition. As he held her, looked at her with his terrified eyes, Helen thought about the famous playwright and his toothache, how his wife had reported hearing a loud thud as she walked to the car.
Schematic
The inside of Toby’s head was lined with plaid and could be packed like a suitcase. It reminded Toby of the pattern inside Doug’s hunting jacket, which Doug had grown too big for and given to Sammy. That was the second thing Toby put inside his suitcase head—the jacket that had been Doug’s. The first thing was this: Gram.
Sometimes, when he and Gram were alone, she’d ask him to try to remember.
“Think, Toby,” she’d say, “to back before they put you in your mama’s belly.”
Toby would search the soft plaid of his mind, pushing past the hunting jacket, past Doug’s old truck sprouting weeds in the front yard, past the names of planets and teachers at school. If he did this long enough, he’d see a Christmas tree, covered in silver hair, rising in a dark room. He, or someone like him, would reach out to touch it and a hand would come down hard on his head. The house with the Christmas tree was different than the house where he lived with Gram and his brothers, now that his mother was gone. The color of the wood was different; there was the stuffy feeling of things having been the same forever—so he guessed it must be the place Gram was talking about.
“Was it beautiful?” Gram wanted to know, her eyes shaking with little dots. Toby could see the tree, filling all the space in his vision, nightmarishly tall.
“Yes,” he said, and she would breathe out, shuddering. “That’s heaven, Toby.”
When the pinball machine showed up in the basement, Gram was already dead. She had died in the early morning, hours before Sammy got there to help her down the stairs. It was Sammy’s job to help her from the chair to her bed at night and from her bed back to her chair in the morning.
It was Toby’s job to open the door for the churchwoman, who came on Tuesday afternoons to help Gram in the bath. After Gram fell asleep, back in her chair, the churchwoman would give Toby a loaf of bread and a jug of milk to take to the kitchen. As she was leaving, she would sometimes look down at Toby and say, “Next time I’ll bring you something special.” Toby would look at the churchwoman’s bag when she came around again, but it was never more than the loaf of bread and jug of milk. Doug could suck down half a jug like that just walking through the door after work.
It was Doug’s job to make sure a flashlight turned on when he touched it to a battery. A long line of flashlights came at him all day on a belt, flashing once then moving on. He said that at night, when he got home, he could still see the lights, turning on and off, which might have been why he couldn’t stay away from the pinball machine in the basement.
Doug had found it out behind the arcade, wedged between the dumpsters. He said that you didn’t find games like that anymore, now that they were all digitized, the sound effects just recordings, the bells inside not real bells.
The pinball machine—Toby wasn’t allowed to touch it—was as tall as a table. It looked like a wooden coffin, propped up on four metal legs, but the sides were stenciled orange and green to show that it was a game, that there was something to be won or lost. There were two parts to this game: a playing field, under glass, where the shiny ball bounced around, and an upright scoreboard. On the face of the scoreboard was an image of a buf
falo, running from a slew of arrows, one already pinned to a red blot in its hide. Behind the arrows rode three naked men on horses, with long, flying braids and big white smiles, pitched forward in cartoon ecstasy.
“Where did you come from?” Doug’s voice was greasy and older than it had ever been.
Toby had just come down the basement stairs. He’d been about to ask Doug why Sammy wasn’t home yet but got distracted by the smiles on the faces of the naked men shooting arrows. They must have been painted on a pane of glass, because their faces would suddenly light up from behind, making those smiles even brighter.
Doug stood at the end of the machine, fingering a metal plunger that looked like a ball. He snapped it back and the machine erupted into musical bells and loud pops. Toby watched Doug’s long middle finger work a button at the side, holding it down, then tapping it furiously. There was a drop, a repetitive pinging of mechanical spinning numbers, and Doug brought his fist down and ran his pelvis into the end of the machine.
“Go to the hiding place and get me my cigarettes, Toby.”
Doug and Sammy kept a store of bottles and magazines in the toolshed, under a bale of hay. Gram would be upset if she knew Doug was smoking in the house, but Toby supposed it must not matter now that she was dead, even if it had only been since that morning. Still, he thought it was important to remember that Gram wouldn’t like it, and to feel sorry inside—a thing to keep.
Prepare Her Page 7
