The Oregon Experiment (9 page)

“Animal sciences.”

“You teach?”

“I do research,” the woman said. “I teach a little. What’s
your
connection?”

“My husband starts this fall in political science.”

“So you’re a trailing spouse?” When Naomi’s eyes narrowed, she quickly added, “It’s just a university term. A designation.”

My career
, Naomi wanted to protest,
beats the hell out of yours
, but instead she looked down the length of the pool, adjusting her goggles. “Take care,” she said, then bobbed under the lane marker to the ladder and hoisted herself up. Her swimsuit was still baggy in spots, anticipating an even bigger belly, and as she climbed step by step up the ladder—feeling the woman’s eyes on her back—water drained off her as if she were a Volkswagen Bug pulled by a crane from the bottom of a lake.

Heading for the sunny patio, she glanced back over her shoulder as the woman launched herself off the block, her body smacking the water’s surface like a plank, her arms and legs immediately propelling her down the lane with barely a splash.

Naomi lay back on her chaise and closed her eyes against the bright sun. Not a stir in her belly. Swimming had put the baby to sleep. Afloat in a floating world.

She still felt contained by her own parents—wrapped up in their embrace—and she’d do the same for her baby. As a kid, when Naomi decided she wanted a bat mitzvah, her father sent her to Hebrew school and bought her a tallis, and her mother spent two years converting and learning to read the
siddur
, and as a family they lived the calendar with a wholehearted commitment that reminded her now of the enthusiasm with which Scanlon immersed himself in projects and with which he would no doubt take up fatherhood.

“Sweetheart,” she heard, taking a moment to realize it was him. She squinted against the sun. He was on the other side of the tall fence, his hands clutching long iron bars on either side of his face. “My office is right up there,” he said, pointing far off at the back of a brick building. “I could see you from my window.” He looked handsome, excited. He was floating in this new world of possibility. “Are you done?” he asked.

She took a deep breath—mint mulch and cut grass. She could sleep right here, but the sun was already too hot on her skin. “In a minute. Yeah.”

“There’s a wonderful cedar smell blowing over from that grove,” he said. “Melted brown sugar. Sticky.”

“Nice,” she said, knowing it was actually Douglas fir. The needles, not the cones or bark. Greener, she thought, than he’d described.

“I’m gonna check out the climbing wall. Meet me by the front door?”

“Twenty minutes,” she said. She really did have to tell him about her nose; this wasn’t fair.

She lay there for three deep breaths, then carried her towel to the locker room, where she nearly ran into the woman from the pool.

“After
you,
” the woman said, then followed her down the row of lockers. “My name’s Blaine. Blaine Maxwell.”

“Naomi Greenburg.”

Blaine pulled off her bathing cap and shook out thick silver hair. Naomi peeled her bathing suit around her belly, let it plop to the floor, and stepped out of it. She took her towel to the shower. Warm water shot out like needles on her skin, and she closed her eyes.

“Your body’s compensating really well.” At the next showerhead: Blaine. “Do you feel it? You’re swinging your legs from the hip. Very smooth. People think of hippos as awkward striders, but they run with tremendous speed and grace. That same sort of straight-legged, high-stepping waddle that you’ve developed.”

Naomi could accept the objectifiability of pregnancy, and she didn’t mind sharing the experience. But comparisons to hippos?

“People are surprised,” Blaine went on, slapping suds from her shoulders and underarms, “that of all the mammals—”

“Do you have children?” Naomi twisted off her shower.

Blaine stopped. She rinsed her face, trying to keep her hair out of the spray, then she turned, her hair appearing grayer now, wet and matted where it edged her face, and she looked at Naomi. Shutting off her shower, she said, “We didn’t”—too loud in the sudden quiet, reverberating off the tile, and she dropped her voice—“we didn’t have any luck in that area.”

Oh, Christ, Naomi thought. Now she’d hurt her feelings. She snagged her towel off the hook. “What’s your area of research?”

“Leaping, primarily. But running and jumping too. Any ground mobility.” If fazed, she’d recovered quickly.

“Kangaroos? Rabbits?”

“They’re actually jumpers. Or, more commonly, hoppers. I’m studying the Pacific leaping frog. A true leaper.”

At their lockers, Naomi began what was becoming more and more of an ordeal: drying her body from the belly down. Blaine made no effort to conceal her study of every undignified reach and grope.

“From what we know about muscle and mechanics,” she continued, “this frog shouldn’t be able to leap nearly as far as it does.”

Naomi lifted a foot to the bench.

“And really remarkable acceleration, even for a leaper.” Blaine stretched and yanked a sports bra into place, then buttoned up the kind of squared-off shirt they sell in backpacking stores. She stepped into a pair of walking shorts, then Tevas, fastening Velcro at her feet, waist, and wristwatch—all before Naomi had adequately dried her inner thighs.

“I actually just started in on a new grant for acceleration. Got my dog Franklin on the payroll. He’s at full speed in three strides. Outstanding for a dog. A goose, by comparison, is up around six or seven strides.”

Naomi was exhausted. All this talk of striding and leaping was wearing her out. Talk, period. She lowered herself to the bench and dried her calves and feet.

“If you’re curious,” Blaine said, “we could put you on the treadmill and videotape your stride as it adapts.”

“Not really my sort of thing,” Naomi said.

“My grad students would be relieved. They have a hell of a time keeping the geese focused. Someone’s got to kneel down at the back of the treadmill to catch them when they suddenly quit running and get shot off the belt. Franklin’s better about it, takes it very seriously. And he should. He’s on the payroll. NSF pays for his food and vet bills.”

She’d been letting Scanlon take pictures of her every few weeks—nude pictures of her belly. It made her feel sexy that he so loved her pregnant. She wished there’d been pregnant photos of herself at age nineteen.

“I read an article on Sherpas recently. The incline and decline, the loads. It doesn’t just affect muscle development but bone density too. And talk about adapting strides. Your load’s a cakewalk by comparison. Your pelvis, I notice—”

“Great meeting you,” Naomi said.

Blaine took the hint. She gathered her things and finally was gone.

Naomi took another fifteen minutes getting dressed, stopping to rest before putting on her socks and running shoes. No question: pregnancy was more exhausting this time around.

Out front, she passed her wet towel and suit to Scanlon, the smell of a dog’s coat on his hands. She
had
to tell him.

“Do you want me to bring the car around?” he asked.

“Let’s just go slow.”

She hooked her arm around his and they walked across the grass, the cuttings already drying in the sun, grainier and bitter. “I was petting this Deutscher boxer,” he said, “and he belonged to the most fascinating woman. She researches how he runs.”

Naomi cocked her head, feeling a water bubble in her ear. She tried to wiggle it away with her fingertip, but that made it worse, plugging her ear up tight.

“Tomorrow for lunch.” Scanlon’s voice sounded miles away, but his smell—the sweet brine and dusty skin she’d only known for a month—was on top of her. “You’re gonna really enjoy this woman.”

Naomi rushed with guilt for disliking how he smelled, and for keeping her nose a secret. Guilt and sadness for all of it.

Clay tongued the tender bump on the inside of his lip; it hadn’t bled, but if he nibbled at it, the taste of blood would seep through the flesh. He dropped a buck and change in the tip jar as the young one—the girl with the cross dangling in her cleavage—no hair net today—slid the foil bag and the icy waxed cup across the counter. The Greyhound had just come in from the coast, and he watched the line of passengers slump through the station. No one he knew. Heading out the door, he snagged a newspaper from a garbage can and read the front page as he went around to the alley and up the stairs to his room.

Chewing his hot-dog burrito, he looked for an article he knew he’d find—if not today, then tomorrow—reporting that in a week or two they’d resume blasting Siuslaw Butte between Douglas and the coast. Soil had been unstable, with unexpected erosion and slides, streams and watersheds compromised—so the roadwork had been suspended. But now the proper officials had pocketed their payoffs, the relevant regulations had been rewritten, and for at least the next year they’d get back to the business of blasting.

Mountain roads that took generations to complete seemed to belong to another era, but this stretch of the Douglas–Yaquina highway was less
than three miles from the section Clay’s father had been blasting ten years ago. The state couldn’t stop themselves—they leveled, widened, straightened. It was their nature.

He sucked Mountain Dew through the straw, twirled the ice, and sucked again, surveying his afternoon’s work: spread out on the floor beside his mattress he had two spools of 24-gauge wire, two 6-volt lantern batteries, PVC pipe, end caps, cement, ten mini flashlights, a cordless drill, wire cutters and pliers, five old-fashioned blasting caps of the type his father used when Clay was a boy. The caps had come from a grisly Portland anarchist, hard core, originally from New Jersey was all Clay knew. And time in prison. Definitely a different edge, these East Coast anarchists. The caps were spendy and just about ran Clay dry, but the rest came from Habitat for Humanity and pawnshops. The drill was nearly gunnybag but would last the job.

He’d been working on this plan for a year, and last night when 13½ told him the grisly dude would be through town today with the caps, he felt the rush of forward motion, of possibility. But the truth was, when Naomi swayed this afternoon and dropped into his arms, bashing him in the mouth with the top of her skull, and he maneuvered her onto the rocking horse, his lip swelling, his hands supporting her back and her hard full belly
—that
rush was altogether different.

When the sun finally shone through the white curtain on their bedroom’s western wall, Scanlon slowly awoke. The curtain filled with honey light, billowing with the easy breeze, as full and round as Naomi’s belly.

Her deep peaceful breathing beside him sounded like the sway of leaves and tall grasses in the summer wind. He smelled the swimming pool. She lay facing him on her side, naked, the white sheet pulled up to her waist. Her belly and breasts rested on the mattress; her small hands were pressed together under her cheek. Soon they’d be three.

Although he still awoke at night panicked about supporting a family, they’d come a long way in a year. Last summer, looking ahead to their second year as dorm parents in a girls’ boarding school outside Boston, he was half-time at BU and had picked up a survey class at Northeastern. Naomi did the dorm-parent duties in exchange for their rent, cafeteria food, and a small stipend. Still, with grad-school loans to pay, health insurance that the school required but didn’t cover, a car payment, and a new
computer, the girls had more pocket money for Saturdays in Boston than Scanlon and Naomi did.

They were mostly run-of-the-mill rich girls from New England and New York, but there was also a pair of sisters from Qatar. Actual princesses. They shared a room outfitted with an absurd stereo that was delivered and installed by technicians, a silver samovar, and a freestanding wardrobe for overflow from the closets. Twice each term they invited Scanlon and Naomi into their room for tea. With their legs folded under them, the princesses sat like jade statues on the zebra pelt covering one bed. Scanlon and Naomi slumped on the other—cheetah, he thought they’d told him—and stirred sugar cubes into the delicate cups with spoons that seemed to be solid gold.

At Christmas the princesses presented them with two Rolexes. They thanked the girls profusely and wore the watches in the dorm for a few weeks, and Scanlon came to like having all that money strapped to his wrist. It surprised him, violating all his politics, but he felt successful wearing that watch. He felt powerful. It was glitzy—diamonds in the face and lots of gold—and the few times he wore it to Blockbuster and 7-Eleven, he liked that people noticed. He was given better service. He could be more demanding, then look straight ahead while eyes followed him, everyone anticipating his next move. When Naomi wore hers, he could easily imagine her as rich and rarefied; she had the exotic Jewish features he associated with biblical beauties in the movies, or Cleopatra, or Nefertiti, or … whatever it was, she was reminiscent of the foundations of our cultural ideals of beauty. And the watch was like draping her in jewels, laying her back on silk pillows, and dismissing the slaves. She became in his imagination a princess herself—one he had full access to.

For a few weeks these fantasies idled around in his head, but finally he and Naomi did the only sensible thing: they put the watches up on eBay. Days later they were holding a check for nine thousand dollars, their heads spinning with the thrill of it, their stomachs hollowed out with guilt—or fear they’d be found out. They set most of it aside for making payments—and somehow it was gobbled up in months—but they spent a thousand or so on good dinners, shoes and a necklace for Naomi, a DVD player, books that Scanlon could get from libraries but enjoyed the luxury of owning. And as
toro
and
ikura
slid chocolaty over their tongues at a wildly expensive sushi bar in Back Bay, Naomi’s sexy feet strapped into shoes she’d rarely have the occasion to wear, they weren’t royal and powerful, but
giddy with the almost sleazy excitement of getting away with something so sweet.

He rolled quietly out of bed and went naked to the kitchen, where he filled two tall glasses with ice and lemonade. There was mint on the counter—stalks that Naomi had brought home—and he pinched off a sprig for each glass. After five o’clock, it was still a beautiful afternoon outside. When he slipped back into bed, Naomi’s rhythmic breathing paused, then she took a long deep breath, and lifted her head. “Hi, lover,” he said, then twirled a glass, clinking the ice.