A Private State: Stories (21 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 138
She's eaten so many whole grains she wonders if the baby will come out smelling like bread. And for all the gyrations of her mind, it's clear her body loves its new condition. Not a dot of acne, and breasts that are finally, amazingly significant. Her body's opened itself happily to this soft invasion. Dr. Howland jots fiercely on Anna's chart. "The baby's slipping nicely into place. Should pop right out."
Usually the doctor's total ease with the animal state of pregnancy makes Anna feel firmer, but today she has to hold back tears. She can't believe it's actually going to happen. She yanks on her clothes and rushes out before she shames herself by asking for an extension.
From the
T
, Anna heads straight to the pool. A little floating will help. At the bottom of the stairs she drops her keys, an event, in late pregnancy, that can take minutes to respond to. She plants her feet and is about to inch herself down when someone else hands them to her.
At first she thinks it's Michael. He's tall and has the same chlorine-stripped hair, dull and bright at the same time. But it's just another man on his way to the pool. She says thanks and stuffs the keys in her bag. The resemblance is close enough to bring Michael back and she feels her stomach's suddenly risen like warm dough.
Even though he's been gone for months, even though he told her he didn't want to know, Anna wonders if she should try to track him down at the tip of Chile where he's watching dying stars through some vast telescope. She has trouble reconciling South America and astrophysics. In her mind, he's sitting in the metallic dome of an observatory, surrounded by technicians speaking Spanish that's liquid but precise, while penguins, wandered in from the Straits of Magellan, mill around the blinking instruments. She wonders if he's lonely. She wonders if he's met some gifted Chilean astronomer and already named a star for her: La Estrella Rosita del Sur.
 
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He couldn't wait to find his own galaxy but he wasn't ready for a baby, he'd been sure about that. They hadn't known each other long. She'd met him at a party the semester Monroe was off snuffling through baseball archives in Cooperstown. Michael had actually been curious about domestic imperialism and told her he liked her name, a palindrome. Always taken with people brave in the face of the foreign, she'd been impressed with his terse account of storms in the Tierra del Fuego.
Still, he was familiar, clean as the boys she'd learned to sail with, He'd told her about a pair of wild-eyed spinster cousins who had yearly visitations from Emily Dickinson. She told him about the clutch of great uncles who looked like wing chairs bumping into each other when they shook hands. She liked that he never pretended science was exact.
Given that, he might have reacted more temperately when the condom tore at an untoward time of month.
Now she feels a powerful kick, wants to grab someone's hand and say, "There! Did you feel it?" with someone who'll let her be proud of this state her body's gotten into, someone who will help her feel hopeful. But that sort of contact was never part of the agreement. It makes her sad it would be so easy to make this gesture with the ladies of the pool, and she doesn't even know their names.
At first Michael was sober, sympathetic. He put his arms around her and said, "There's a good clinic in Brookline." So had this happened before? How could he be so cool and fertile all at once? It was then she unwound his arms and said, "I'm not sure."
He got upset only once, and Anna had liked him so much better like this. His cheeks had flared pink. "Why are you doing this? Why can't you wait for someone who wants to do this with you?" he hissed at her one afternoon on the Esplanade where people on bikes and skates whizzed by.
Later he called and told her she could go ahead and have it but he'd talked to a lawyer and it was clear he had no obligations. She
 
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was quiet on the other end. There wasn't much to say after that. "You don't even know if people in my family get Alzheimer's," he blurted, then trailed off, distant, and, Anna thought, more than a little sad. After they'd hung up, she'd sat there on the floor, knees pulled into her chest, staring at the telephone, wishing she were made of the same numb, white plastic.
Now, at the bottom of the stairs, she wishes she could have told him something more concrete, more correct, something other than "I just can't." But she couldn't get near words to get at the weird deep thrill. The sense that her body was a vessel, firm and flexible and ready. But my family! she had shouted to herself. My colleagues! She imagined smirks and stares, a career permanently crippled.
Then there was the test strip. The instructions in the packet read, "If the strip is blue, the results are positive. You can assume you are pregnant." On a warm Sunday morning, her strip was sapphire. And she was instantly aware of her shaking hands, clean light filtering through the gauzy curtains, the creamy tile. Something knotted in her belly, then unwound. And inside her, a buzzing hum, a something live. The instant before panic touched off a fire in her brain, that had been her first reaction: that it was positive.
In the showers, Anna watches the curved back of an old woman breaking the flow of water from the high faucet. Wet beads run along the strap of her cap as she says to her friend, "And now it's macular degeneration of the retina." She points to her eye and the beads start running along her finger. "And does anyone offer to drive me to the specialist?" Her friend, more varicose, already rinsed, just nods.
Anna lets the hot water pound into her back and tries to be courageous. Will her baby do this to her one day? Let her eyesight degenerate and never offer to do the shopping? Everyone who passes contains dark potential. A blond with bruises the shape of
 
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quarters on her arms where a boyfriend might have held her too tightly. A girl so thin her skin's blue as skim milk.
Anna shivers in the water, feels the baby stir, and a pang. She wants nothing more than to walk back to her locker, get dressed, go huddle with the familiar, faded ladies of the Raj, and cook dinner with Monroe. The old circle, before the baby stretched the diameter. Before she'd listened to the dumb, pulsing signal of her body and an intuition that this had been the right thing to do. Instead, she pulls herself out to the pool, with her mother's words strangely in her head: "Lean into it." Babe, as brown and sexless as a twig, has always had stamina.
Last week, Babe had made it clear Anna was expected at Thanksgiving dinner on the North Shore. Anna was surprised her parents seemed so intent on having her seen at eight and a half husbandless months in front of the cousins and neighbors. "And bring Monroe," Anna's mother said. Babe loves Monroe and says things like, "So tell me about the Great Midwest," as if he's just come back from Mauritania. Monroe also likes Babe, likes to study Anna's family and make comments about the more inane the New England nickname, the higher the probability that the family has Mayflower blood. The fact that Anna's grandmother was called "Dodo" is a case in point.
That
was social confidence, he said.
But this year he was going back to Lansing and Anna found herself reflexively following the route to her parents' house. She knew what she'd find: a gleaming table strewn with shellacked and bumpy gourds, linen wings of napkins. From guests, Anna anticipated muffled silence and compressed lips. She wore a brown quilted dress that made her feel like the turkey.
Babe presided at the table, spry in her green suit as she passed cut-glass bowls of cranberry jelly. A vigorous fund raiser for pro-choice candidates, she talked politics with a vengeance. They'd not survived the last election but you would have thought they'd won the White House given the voltage of Babe's smile.
 
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At the other end of the Thanksgiving table, Anna's father, Jack, passed the stuffing. "Jack," Anna thought, sounded like a sail in a stiff wind, but despite the snap of his name, he'd always let Babe take the lead, though he unfailingly remembered which wars to talk about with which uncle and cousin and who liked light and dark. He carved as if he were playing violin, with long, graceful sweeps.
Guests asked politely about Anna's health. She might have been convalescing from the flu. Then the conversation slid to this year's sewage bill and the fine job the new minister was doing at Grace Church. After the meal, the relatives gave her a kiss with papery lips and drifted off to their cars. Anna crammed extra yam into plastic bowls. The warm wake of the turkey was heavy in the kitchen. Babe looked out of the window at Jack talking to Max, a young neighbor wistfully spinning a football. Max hadn't been able to convince Jack to play.
Pea would have played with the boy, even though he hated football. But Pea had been dead for years. Pea, short for his middle name, "Peabody, of course," Monroe once said, and Anna couldn't deny it.
"But you know the sound when you're shelling peas, the little ping on the side of the metal bowl? That was Pea," she told him. Part of him at least. Rheumatic fever crimped his height when he was little, and he was wiry, with red hair and a genius for taking things apart. Once he fed blue dye into Babe's sprinklers and Anna remembered the blue jewels of water studding the hosta.
Anna looked at her mother and suspected she was thinking about Pea, too. The gravy boat in Babe's hands was half-polished smooth, half-gleaming with water. All of a sudden, Babe looked shrunken under her apron.
But after Pea died, it was Jack who'd gone awry. He had walked out blank eyed and grinning from his office on State Street about three months after it happened and hadn't been back
 
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since. It had stretched him too far, as if his heart were a ligament that lost its elasticity.
Babe planted the garden with Pea's favorites, bachelor buttons and zinnias, though she'd always said zinnias were gaudy. It was an off year for elections, and instead she sent Anna clippings about grief from various living sections. It was the year Anna decided to study history in graduate school. It was the year she started yelling at her mother.
The pulse in Babe's jaw started up as she looked out the window at her husband. Anna wondered what would happen if her mother let go, if she burst like the monsoon in this mannered New England house. It might sweep them all right into the Atlantic, and Anna wasn't sure if she could stand this happening or if it would be wonderful. Then Babe said, ''Anna, what are you going to name this child anyway?"
Babe and Anna watched Max cross the lawn to his house. "Names are very important. I'll never forgive my mother for calling me Babe. At least Pea was only Pea at home," Babe said. She finished drying the silver and looked at Anna. "You're taking those vitamins I gave you, aren't you?"
Anna had tried to hug Babe when she said good-bye, but it was awkward with her stomach. On her way back to Boston, she couldn't lose the picture of her parents standing on the front porch, bravely waving her off with the hollow smile of after holidays. A small green flame standing next to a larger gray smudge, her parents.
Their colors, gray and green, are still swaying in front of her when she gets out to the pool, which today looks menacingly blue and cold. The lifeguards seem even blanker than usual in their poolside chairs, leafing through heavy textbooks on their knees. Tinny music streams from their radio, pings off the cool, white ceiling.
There's a new sign hung on the far wall: it says "No Horseplay"
 
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in high white letters on a red field. Anna starts to smile when she sees it, feels something inside uncurl. It would be something to see horseplay froth up the water in this tranquil, sterile place. She wonders how low the play threshold is. Pea would have savored this, would have pressed the passive lifeguards for an exact definition. Once when the family was on vacation in the West Indies, he had bribed the old man tending the stables to give up two of the horses for an afternoon. She was eleven, he was seventeen. Even then she was taller, but she followed him everywhere. So it hadn't seemed strange when he took off the saddles and said they'd be riding bareback. But then he flicked his reins on his horse's neck and steered it to the edge of the ocean.
"Pea, can we do this? Are you sure?" Anna's horse sensed her nervousness, pawed once, twice, at the soft foam.
"Anna, get over it." He'd turned around and smiled, then nudged his brown horse further into the water. She saw the muscles of its hind legs tighten and release as it stepped into the slowly rolling surf. Anna's followed and she lay close on the warm neck, holding the reins in tight.
Through the water, she could see the dark spokes of the legs searching for purchase on the sand. The horses' ears were pricked high. They snuffled in the salt air.
"Pea, I want to go back." She felt her stomach surge, a tingling crescent of fear around her neck. The horse was breathing hard, the slippery muscles under her legs smooth and pulsing, carrying her out toward the navy line of the horizon.
"No going back, Anna," he said to her, quite close, quite soft. Then his horse surged ahead and Anna looked down and saw the legs were leaving the fine sand, and they were swimming, surging through the water on the shining backs of the horses. The water crested over the reins and she was flooded with something sharp and clean. The sun was impossibly bright.
It hadn't ended well. The woman who ran the resort came back

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