Abbott Awaits (12 page)

Abbott occasionally forgets that pregnancy culminates in childbirth. More precisely, Abbott only occasionally remembers that pregnancy culminates in childbirth. Abbott's wife's gradual expansion, though, is indeed caused by a very small and helpless creature with no reasoning skills. As that creature grows, it will eat sand and develop ear infections. From time to time Abbott remembers, always with a sense of euphoric apprehension. This afternoon Abbott, his wife, and their daughter are visiting the hospital, or, in the idiom of third-trimester checklists,
touring the birthing facility
. Touring a birthing facility is, Abbott discovers, a powerful mnemonic. He can see the weary parents and grandparents walking the halls. The women, the new mothers, move slowly and clutch IV stands, medical carts, bassinets, or nurses. They don't clutch husbands. The husbands are useless. They are stranded in the old world, while the women clearly have visited a distant place on their own. And now they're back and their bodies are wrecked and their eyes have that unfocused look that seems to be less about fatigue than transcendence—as if conventional sense perception is no longer interesting or even necessary. The husbands are goofy and exalted, happy and proud. They are incapable of walking
at the appropriate pace. They walk too far ahead of the women, and then they come back and walk too far behind them, and then they begin walking too far ahead again. In the nursery the swaddled newborns lie peacefully beneath heat lamps, giving the false impression that they are good. One opens its eyes slowly. “Baby,” Abbott's daughter says as Abbott holds her up to the window. They tour the recovery room, the kitchen. Abbott is pleased to learn that the chair becomes a bed, that the refrigerator is open to fathers. “Same as the last time,” Abbott's wife tells Abbott, and he nods as if he remembers. Every nurse talks to Abbott's daughter. “Look at you,” they say. “Aren't you sweet.” They give her stickers that say
I Was Brave
and
I'm a Big Sister
. Abbott's daughter peels the stickers and applies them to herself immediately. Roxanne, the nurse and tour guide, speaks only to Abbott's wife, as if Abbott does not understand the language. “You're cesarean, right?” Abbott's wife nods, and Abbott nods too. “OK,” Roxanne says, “on the morning you come in, we'll set you up in a birthing room. We'll get you hooked to the monitor and get your vitals and prepare you for the section. We'll need to get a catheter in. You know about that, Mom. We'll put Dad in scrubs. Then we'll take you to the O.R. and start the anesthesia. You'll be awake the whole time, Mom. When that's ready, we'll come for Dad. After the delivery, we'll clean up the baby right there in the room. If everything is OK, we'll keep the little one in there with you. We don't split up mothers and babies if we don't have to. It's not like the old days. When they finish stitching you up, Mom, we'll take all of you to a different room for recovery. Do you have any questions?” Abbott's mind is a vast windy plain at dusk, swept clean of word and thought. “No,” Abbott's wife says. “Great,” says Roxanne. “We'll see you in a few weeks.” Abbott tries to show his daughter the babies in the nursery once more, but this time the blinds are drawn. They leave the hospital then and go downtown for a large pizza.

Abbott mows the lawn, secretly enjoying himself. His wife and daughter play with sticks in the driveway. He cannot hear them over the sound of the mower, nor does he want to. The mown lines are green and fragrant; the robins drop into his wake for worms. The lawn is filled with weeds, but even weeds look good after mowing. This old mower just runs and runs. The blade is new and scrupulous. Abbott installed it an hour ago, lying beneath the propped mower, tightening the bolt with two hands, a grunt. At the end of a long row, he turns the mower back toward the house and sees that his wife and daughter are no longer in the driveway. They've probably gone back inside. Now the evening is still good, but not quite as good as it was.

Actually, it appears to be a minimum-wage employee in a gorilla costume, but Abbott feels neither scorn nor pity nor melancholy. He's not speculating why it is that primates are comic, and he's not reflecting pensively about Dian Fossey or evolutionary branching. This is because he's with his daughter, and his daughter is, in the presence of the gorilla, enraptured. Just think about her afternoon. It begins with another rainy-day trip to the chain bookstore on Route 9, and suddenly it has a
gorilla
in it. And this gorilla appears to be improvising—it is bounding over children's tables, knocking down display books, and pounding its chest loudly, at least for a bookstore. Abbott's daughter stands with her fingers in her mouth, immobilized by ecstasy. She is a conductor. She conducts wonder. Wonder passes from the world to Abbott through his daughter. One could say that he is taking pleasure in the reckless bookstore gorilla, but he is not even looking at the reckless bookstore gorilla. He is looking at his daughter as she looks at the gorilla. Later—not now, thank goodness—Abbott will have to consider how it is possible that
watching
another person live so fully and directly can feel so powerfully like living fully and directly.

Abbott and his wife walk toward each other in the cluttered family room, though they are not each other's destination. There is only one narrow path through the clutter. As they meet, Abbott turns sideways to the left to allow his wife to pass, and as she does, he grabs her right breast. In fairness, he means to caress her right breast, but it is difficult to caress a moving body part. If pressed, Abbott would be forced to admit that there is not one erotic aspect of this tableau. Not one. It's late morning, very hot. Abbott's wife is deep in the third trimester of a rough pregnancy. Their daughter is with them in the room, squeezing old bath water out of a lobster. Abbott is wearing what he wore yesterday, and perhaps the day before that. Abbott's wife laughs, but not in the right way. “What?” Abbott says, prepared to defend the indefensible. “I just don't know what you were hoping to accomplish,” she says. Abbott does not know, either, so this conversation will have no brakes and no steering mechanism. “You just never know,” he says, “when a little spark can start a fire.” Despite the joke, he is not joking, which is to say his irony is ironic. “A fire?” she says. “Are you serious?” “Of course not,” Abbott says. “Then what—” his
wife begins, but she stops and begins again. “I think it's potentially sweet that you groped me,” she says. “But I'm sorry, you are just not going to start a fire.” She pulls her maternity blouse up over her stomach. There's a watermelon. It's her flesh, and it is exciting, but it is also looks at this point like a carnival exhibit. “This,” she says, holding her belly like a big potted plant, “this is inflammable.” “Right,” Abbott says. He is not so dumb as to think now is a good time to bring up the quirky lexical item that
inflammable
is in fact a synonym, not an antonym, for
flammable
. You can look it up. And thus his wife has just unwittingly suggested her sexual readiness, her
combustibility
. Abbott's wife says, “She's not drinking from that lobster, is she?” Abbott, typically so heedful, is unconcerned. There is a quirky lexical item he is determined to share.

Not entirely sober, Abbott finds his wife standing at a living-room window that looks out upon what might initially appear to be a low bright moon, but which is in fact a yellow streetlight in a cloud of moths. Abbott is reminded, later, of something he once read: A human might mistake a rock for a bear, but never a bear for a rock. This is the type of window in front of which you might hold a crying infant. He puts his hands on his wife's shoulders, which neither relax nor tense. Indeed, it seems to Abbott that she has not noticed his touch. The cat watches them from the corner of the room. It looks unhappy. “You OK?” Abbott says. When his wife does not answer, he says, “Maybe we should have waited another year.” Without seeming to move, Abbott's wife sheds his hands from her shoulders. He takes a step backward. With her teeth she says, “Be that as it may.”

“Those couches,” Abbott says. “I know,” his wife says. “I saw one with hexagonal arms,” he says. “Did you see the one with rhinestones?” she says. “I saw that one,” he says. “It also had about twenty overlapping cushions.” Abbott's wife turns off the engine and opens the door. She moves both legs to the side, so that her feet are on the driveway. Then she grabs the edge of the door with her left hand and the top of the steering wheel with her right. After a deep breath, she hoists herself out of the car. Abbott gets out, too. He knows it's boring to talk about the heat, but my God it's hot. In August it is hard to believe this is Ethan Frome's hometown. As Abbott unbuckles his daughter from her seat, he sees his wife looking intently at the ground. “What is it?” he says, his head still in the car. His wife either does not hear him or ignores him. There is a big difference. He sees her kick at something in the driveway. She seems to be trying to nudge it into the grass, but without success. Then she leans down into a squat, picks the thing up, examines it, and tosses it underhanded into the grass. The motion of her toss might best be described as a
scattering
,
as of birdseed or ashes. The tips of her fingers are together, her knuckles are facing up. “What was that?” Abbott says loudly. “Nothing,” she says. Abbott knows it was either nothing or something. “Well, what was it?” he says. Abbott's wife comes out of her squat—the expression on her face suggests it is one of the most difficult things she has ever done with her body. Then she walks into the house without saying anything. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Abbott knows that he is not going to let this go. All afternoon his wife continues to say the thing in the driveway was nothing, convincing Abbott it was something indeed. He stops just short of pleading. He attempts to make his interest seem primarily academic, scientific. Then at dinner Abbott's wife casually elaborates—she says she thought the thing in the driveway was a coin but then she looked at it and found that it was not a coin. “A coin?” Abbott says. “Yes,” she says. They pass food and say
please
and
thank you
. “Then what was it?” he says, trying to match her composure. “Just a little piece of foil or metal,” she says. “Hm,” he says. Then they tell some funny stories to the girl and have a nice family dinner. But later in bed, after the books are on the nightstands and the lights are out, Abbott says, “Let me tell you why that is a lie.” Abbott's wife says, “What are you talking about?” “First,” he says, “if that's all it was, some coinlike object, you would have told me right away. There would have been no reason to be so secretive. Second, if it was a coin—if you thought it was a coin—you would have tried to pick it up
before
you tried to kick it in the grass. But you tried to kick it first. Why would you kick what you thought to be a coin into the grass? You kicked first and
then
squatted down to look at it, which is not consistent with the actions of someone who thought she saw a coin and then discovered it wasn't. Come to think of it, I don't know why you would kick
a little piece of foil or metal
into the grass, either. You're someone who is concerned about the environment and also about our lawn. Not to mention the fact that when I went out there after dinner to look for it, I didn't see anything resembling the object you describe.” “The object I describe,” Abbott's wife says. “And speaking of squatting,” Abbott says, “exactly what type of U.S. coin would entice you, in August, in the ninth month of pregnancy, to bend down and pick it up? A fifty-cent piece? A Susan B. Anthony silver dollar?” “It was a gold doubloon,” she says. “Lastly,” Abbott says, “nobody
says
coin
. No native speaker of English would ever say,
I think I see a coin in the driveway
. You would say
quarter
or
nickel
or whatever it was, though again, I can't imagine you would bend down to pick up a nickel, knowing you may never get back up.” “OK,” she says. “And also, lastly, the way you threw it, your throwing motion. That was not—” “OK,” Abbott's wife says. “Please stop. Do you really want to know what it was?” “Yes, I do,” Abbott says, suddenly not at all sure that he does. “Fine,” she says. “It was a lock of hair. I tried to kick it off the driveway, but I couldn't, so I picked it up and tossed it in the grass, using the motion you so scrupulously observed. It isn't easy to throw hair.” “Hair?” he says. Abbott is momentarily confused by the fact that a lock of hair bears no resemblance to a coin, but he recovers. “A lock of hair,” she says. “Probably from earlier in the summer. Maybe it blew out of the pachysandra. On the driveway it looked, I guess,
mildly
disturbing, and I knew if you saw it you would have a—” Abbott says, “What would I have?” Abbott's wife says, “You would have a reaction.” So many words in the dark. Abbott has imagined all this marital talk discoloring the walls and ceiling like nicotine. “So,” Abbott says, “you hid it from me, and then you lied about it all day.” “That's right,” his wife says. “Because I know you.” The static of the monitor sounds to Abbott like the sound of his own thinking. He does not know whether his wife's deception is an instance of compassion or cruelty. Furthermore, he does not know the scale or the degree of the compassion or cruelty. It could be insignificant, but it could also represent something large, some kind of turning point. It could be the moment he understands something—either the fact that the marriage is so deep he will never touch bottom or the fact that the marriage might not work out. This would be the time to go down to the basement and walk around for a while, but his wife rolls over and puts her hand on his chest. Her hand is warm and small. The pressure of her touch is not heavy, but neither is it light.