Strange Animals (3 page)

James Dobbs finished
eating dinner in the kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment and put on his work clothes. He had had the same job on an overnight cleaning crew at Dillard's in the West Ridge Mall since graduating high school seven years earlier. The work wasn't difficult, and James considered how he didn't have to deal with very many people to be a perk.

As he drove, James thought about a girl named Rebecca. She worked at Dillard's and sometimes stayed late enough that James would see her leaving as he was coming in to begin the night's cleaning. He had never spoken to her, but he knew her name because she sometimes forgot to take off her name tag when she was leaving for the night. James wondered if God had put Rebecca in his life to teach him something or if, perhaps, she was the girl God meant for him. James said a prayer asking God to give him a sign that night. If Rebecca was the girl that God in
tended for him to marry, James asked only that God give him some unmistakable signal that this was the case.

As he turned off Wanamaker Road and into the West Ridge Mall parking lot closest to Dillard's, he could see Rebecca emerging from the building. James spotted her red Toyota Camry, with its Kansas State Wildcat bumper sticker, and he parked next to it. He waited in his car for a few moments longer than necessary, then got out and made his way toward the building so that his path to the door would cross Rebecca's. He looked at her in anticipation of the sign he asked God to deliver, but Rebecca didn't return his gaze. She was talking on her phone and looking down into her purse, completely oblivious to James and everything else around her. He silently repented for his sin of pride, for asking God for something so foolish and petty.

And then Rebecca's phone, precariously perched between her ear and shoulder, fell onto the ground an inch from James's feet, cracking its screen. This, he was certain, was the sign from God that he'd prayed for. He bent down, picked up the phone, and handed it back to Rebecca. She said, “Thanks. This is the second phone I've ruined digging for my keys.”

God was probably real, but it seemed that praying was a waste of time. Whichever God created Earth certainly didn't care about what happened to the planet or the people on it. The solar system was the same thing as the galaxy and the universe—they were all just different ways of describing space, which was essentially anything beyond Earth. Science was good when it made the complications of living a little easier to deal with, by creating things like the Internet and cell phones, but there was no real need to waste time and money on space exploration or smashing atoms. Sex was a natural and instinctual part of being human, and no matter what any person's sexual preference, as long as it wasn't illegal, there was no need to bring religion into it. Abortion was a viable option for any girl who wasn't ready to raise a child. It wasn't something to take lightly, just a medical
procedure. These were things that Rebecca understood to be true.

With a confidence that came from knowing that God had ordained this event, James introduced himself and told Rebecca that he saw her from time to time when he was coming in to start his shift. He told her that he'd wanted to stop and say hello, but he was too embarrassed. James went on to ask Rebecca if she'd be interested in getting dinner or seeing a movie with him on a night when she wasn't busy. James was confident that Rebecca would agree to go out with him, given that God had just given him a sign to ask her out.

Rebecca said, “Oh my god, that's seriously really sweet of you to ask, but I have a boyfriend. Sorry.”

James stood in front of her, too confused to reply. She said, “Well, have a good night,” and got in her car. As he walked into Dillard's and took the floor polisher out of its storage closet, he silently asked God if he had done something wrong, if he had misinterpreted the sign. He listened closely for any sound of God's voice, for any answer. All he heard was the loud hum and bristling of the brushes polishing the tile floor in the housewares department as he pushed the machine back and forth.

On his break, James avoided his coworkers and ate a sandwich in his car. He looked out his window at the spot on the ground where Rebecca had dropped her phone. The sign God had given him was a phone breaking. He began to understand that this sign was a negative sign. It wasn't a dove flying overhead, a beam of golden light parting the clouds, an angel trumpeting from the heavens. A phone hit the ground, and its screen shattered. It became clear to him that Rebecca was a temptation from Satan, and the sign he had prayed for, the sign that was delivered by God, wasn't meant to motivate him to ask Rebecca on a date. It was meant to warn him. God had given James a sign to say away from her.

This is what Pastor Preston had been talking about. James
assumed that God's plan was to bring Rebecca into his life, but it had become clear to James that this was incorrect. James understood that his own human desires were clouding his ability to surrender to God's plan. James finished his sandwich and thanked God for looking after him. He promised God that he would try to be more observant of his signs and more understanding of them. He promised God that he would do his best to suppress his own desires and his own thoughts about what should happen in his life so that he could more easily be used in whatever manner God intended.

Karen's menstrual cycle
was fairly regular. It had been this way since she got her first period in junior high school. She would occasionally skip a period. It wasn't common for her to do so, but it did happen. But only one of those occasions came after she became sexually active. She was a freshman in college, and she had engaged in unprotected sex a few times with a fellow student who became her first college boyfriend.

The month after these initial unprotected sexual encounters, Karen did not get her period. When she began to suspect she was pregnant, she went to the campus health center, only to find out that she wasn't. The doctors there told her that it's not uncommon for girls entering their freshman year of college to miss a period due to the stress of such an extreme change in their lives. The doctors also said that an increased intake of alcohol and drugs can be contributing factors. Although Karen didn't admit
this to the doctors, she felt that this second explanation was far more plausible in her case.

Paul had already gotten out of bed, made himself breakfast, and left for work by the time Karen woke up. She could still smell the bacon he cooked. She knew she had missed her period the month before, which she attributed to mounting stress concerning her dissertation. But she was now aware that a week had passed since her period was due again, which meant that she had missed her second period in a row. This was something she had never experienced. After checking her phone's calendar to see that she had only one afternoon class to teach, she decided to spend the morning buying and taking a pregnancy test, just to be on the safe side.

Once inside her neighborhood CVS, she paused for a moment to really absorb the experience. It was the first time she had ever purchased a pregnancy test, and she viewed it as a strange kind of a rite of passage—something that was available to women only recently in the overall timeline of humanity. She tried to imagine what it must have been like before pregnancy tests, before women had options. Then she tried to imagine what it would be like for women in the future. She wondered if it would be better, if there would be some kind of male birth control, if there would be no social stigma associated with an abortion, or if it would be worse. She knew it was possible that the future could see a return to more restrictive laws and social norms where reproduction was concerned, where a woman's freedom was concerned. In Karen's mind it was completely plausible that the next superpower to govern the world after America could be any one of the currently existing misogynistic societies around the globe. Without any foreknowledge of what might be in store for future generations, she considered herself lucky to live in the time she did.

She made her way to the family planning aisle and realized she didn't know enough about the variety of pregnancy tests to
make a quick selection. As she looked over the dozen or so possible choices and read the back of some of the boxes, Karen became aware of other CVS patrons watching her. She didn't know if this was an accurate assessment of the situation, but it felt accurate. She questioned her uneasiness in this moment, but she gave into it nonetheless, grabbing a First Response test without inspecting it and walking to the front.

Paul always made some derogatory comment about automation being the downfall of society when they encountered self-checkout machines in grocery stores, but Karen was glad that CVS had an entire bank of them as she purchased her pregnancy test. But as she walked back to her car, she mentally scolded herself for feeling any shame at all about her purchase.

At home, as she sat on the toilet urinating onto the plastic stick, she knew what she would do if she was, in fact, pregnant. She would have an abortion. Both she and Paul had discussed with certainty how neither of them ever wanted children. This made the possible positive result of the pregnancy test seem more like an injury or illness that Karen would have to seek medical care to treat. In her mind it was more of a significant and horribly unpleasant inconvenience than a life-changing decision.

She pulled her pants back up and stood in the bathroom for the three minutes the box indicated were necessary for the hormones from her urine to react with the chemicals on the stick. As the final seconds of those three minutes ticked by, Karen watched two pink lines materialize in the small oval window at the end of the stick. She said, “Fuck,” and flipped open her laptop to Google the nearest Planned Parenthood.

She found that the Hollywood Health Center was the closest to her. As she called to make an appointment, she soothed herself by rationalizing that the Hollywood Planned Parenthood office had probably done more abortions than any Planned Parenthood in the country, so their skill level should be high at least. She made an appointment for the following day, and then called
Tanya and asked her to come over. She told Tanya that she had big news.

Karen knew that Tanya didn't share her views on abortion, and she also knew that the situation had more innate gravity than she was willing to acknowledge. “Guess what?” she said to her friend when she arrived.

Tanya said, “What?”

Karen said, “I'm preggers!”

“Wait, what?”

“I know. It sucks. I don't know what happened. There were a few days two months ago when I had the flu and I didn't take my pill, but Paul didn't come inside me for at least a week or so after that. Anyway, doesn't matter now. What's done is done.”

“Holy shit. What did Paul say?”

“He doesn't really, uh, know at this point.”

“Holy shit. You have to tell him.”

“Stop holy shitting me and calm down. I don't have to tell him at all. I obviously have to do something, but telling him is not that something.”

“That's not cool. That's his baby, too.”

“It's not anybody's baby right now. It's not even a fucking baby at all. It's a little ball of snot stuck to the wall of my uterus. That's it.”

“You can't be serious. You're really not going to tell him about it?”

“No, I'm not. And neither are you.”

“Why wouldn't you tell him?”

Until that moment, Karen hadn't thought about why she didn't want to tell her boyfriend about the pregnancy. Practically, the situation would be resolved by the end of the following day. She didn't see the need to involve Paul. But beyond that, she realized that she was feeling a certain amount of shame, guilt, and embarrassment for having gotten pregnant in the first place. She thought about all the conversations she and Paul had about
not having children, about all the times they had laughed at their friends when they replaced their Facebook profile pictures with sonograms, about how they each hated the idea of willingly replacing themselves. This one shared view was something they took pride in and had built at least some part of their relationship around.

She felt that the pregnancy was somehow her fault, an easily preventable mistake. She knew logically this wasn't the case, but she couldn't help how she felt. On top of that, she knew that there was at least some chance that if Paul should find out about the pregnancy and the abortion that would follow, it might alter their relationship. Even though Karen knew that Paul would agree with her decision and take her to the appointment and care for her after the procedure, she felt it was better to leave him out of it. This wasn't an experience she wanted him to have to share.

Karen said, “I just don't want him to know, okay?”

Tanya said, “Obviously, I'll do whatever you want me to, but I'm telling you, you should seriously think about telling him. I know you're probably trying to downplay this in your head, but it's is a bigger deal than you think.”

“No, it's really not, and that's how it's going to stay.”

“Okay, fine.”

“And I need you to take me to Planned Parenthood tomorrow.”

“What? I'm not helping you get an abortion.”

“I went to church with you that one time your boyfriend dumped you on Easter.”

“I can't believe you're making jokes about this.”

“I'm sorry. I know this is seriously against everything you stand for and all of that shit. But I really need your help, Tanya. You're my best friend, and I called you because you're the only person I want to know about it. You're the only person I really trust. Will you help me, please?”

“Are you serious right now?”

“Yes.”

Tanya took a moment, exhaled a long breath, gave Karen a hug, and then said, “You know the fucking irony here, right? As a Christian, I have to help you when you're in need and I can't pass judgment. So I'll take you. But I don't agree with this at all. At all.”

“I know you don't, and that's why you're my best friend.”

That night Karen ate dinner with Paul, watched television with Paul, and had sex with Paul without telling him that she was pregnant with his child. While they had sex he said, “I think your boobs are getting bigger.” Karen denied it, even though she knew he was right. Her bras had been getting tighter. She knew that after the following day, her hormones would return to their normal levels and her breasts would return to their normal size. Karen knew that this would be the closest Paul would ever come to finding out she was pregnant.

As Paul slept, Karen remained awake, building dread by imagining the procedure she'd have to endure the following day. She rubbed a hand over her stomach in small circles and thought to herself that this would very likely be the only interaction she would have with a child of her own.