Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

She bound her feet with twine in order to cut off the circulation. She plucked hairs from her face and secretly bit her tongue. She ate too many grapefruit, and rinsed the cold sores in her mouth with vinegar, salt, and lime concentrate. She explored those regions of her body where sewing needles didn’t leave marks. It might be Boyd’s house, but it was still her body. I, Harriet told herself, am completely my decision.

Boyd began exhibiting a strange and unhealthy concern for Harriet’s menses, circling dates on the Val’s Used Autos calendar with a black felt laundry marker. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thurs day,” Boyd told himself out loud, and circled the final date with a proud little flourish, as if he were endorsing a particularly generous check. Then he took the thermometer from the kitchen cabinet, swabbed it with alcohol, and called out Harriet’s name.

There was something implacable about the way Boyd made love to her now, as if he were straining against the skin of a bubble, trying to tell her something language could not convey. “I’ve reinsulated the attic,” Boyd told her in bed, rocking gently against her, as cautious as if he were caressing helium. “I’ve discussed the basement plumbing with a regional contractor. This spring, I’ll paint the place. I’ll put down new carpets and a new yard. Depreciation, baby. That’s what finally buries you. By the way, did I tell you I love you, Harriet? Did I tell you you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life?”

There were books on the bureau beside the thermometer. The Home Pregnancy Handbook, Fertility and Nutrition, Conception and the Stars. Harriet, however, was wary of books. She was afraid they might not keep their words to themselves.

“I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl,” Boyd said later. “I just hope it’s a Gemini.”

By now, Harriet felt so estranged from her own body she couldn’t believe any of it was happening to her. Nurses, obstetricians, waxed fluorescent corridors, hurrying orderlies, and drugged, dozing patients on gurneys. From the moment the doctor told her, Harriet pretended to play along.

“Get plenty of rest,” the doctor told her. “And exercise. A nice long walk every morning should do it. Don’t drink to excess, but a little wine in the evening won’t hurt anything.”

“Okay,” Harriet said. She was looking at a dietary chart the doctor had presented her. The chart was printed on an embossed sheet of plastic and depicted colorful pie graphs, statistical charts, and a brief illustrated history of gestation. “I can do that.”

“She looks like a madonna,” Boyd’s mother said. “She looks like the most beautiful mother-to-be in the entire world.” Wanda and Phil arrived every Saturday afternoon bearing homemade soups, casseroles, Tupperware-clad fruit salads, and bright packaged gifts Harriet was expected to open. Blankets, diaper bags, Nerf toys, music boxes, Pooh books, illustrated nursery rhymes. Harriet would smile and try to look nonplussed.

“She seems so peaceful. So content with herself.”

“Her body’s generating this drug that helps her relax—I read about it once in a magazine.”

“She used to be so edgy and insecure. Boyd’s been really good for her. He knew all along she just needed someone to care for. It’s a woman’s biological role. Even when women aren’t having babies, they dream about having them all the time.”

“That’s the full flush of motherhood, all right,” Phil said wisely, and showed Boyd the roll of floral-patterned linoleum he had purchased for the family room. “And we know it’ll be a beautiful baby, because all Boyd’s women have beautiful babies.”

Now at night it was Harriet who wanted to make love, and Harriet who wanted Boyd to hold her. Boyd was always reading now— You and Your Baby, Dr. Spock’s Guide to Infant Growth and Development, Owning Your Second Home, Building Your Own Bomb Shelter . He ate Butterfinger candy bars, drank warm beer from aluminum cans, and watched war movies on late-night TV.

“Tell me,” Harriet insisted, “tell me, tell me.” Straining against Boyd’s density, his steel and concrete and brick.

“We have to be careful,” Boyd whispered, overturning his paperback on the end table, lowering himself under the blankets as if he were immersing himself in a cold tub. “Your condition. This trimester. For all concerned. You know I love you.”

“Tell me,” Harriet said, pushing, reaching, clenching his callused hands against her breasts, demanding his skin, his impact, his intestinal flux and hiss.

“You’re going to hurt yourself, honey. Now please, let me, let me…”

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Harriet said, over and over again, trying to engage the secret harmony of it, trying to make her own words matter.

“Tell you what, Harriet? What do you need to know, honey? Tell me what it is you want me to say.”

Boyd was always mending, reupholstering, abrading, polishing, trying to hide things from her. Nicks and imperfections, textures, conspiracies of pipe and cable. He painted things, and applied wallpaper, and hung new doors, working late into the night while Harriet slept. Sawing, hammering, painting. New bolts on the windows, new drapes in the living room. The scraping of metal against metal. The screak of vises. The shuddering of lathes.

“After we have the baby, Boyd, then what? What happens to us then?”

She lay beside him in bed. Boyd was sketching things on a clipboard.

“Hmm,” Boyd said. He was consulting the latest issue of Home Design Management that lay open in his lap.

“You’re not listening to me, Boyd.”

“Of course I’m listening.” He held a glimmering metric ruler up to the light. “Once we have the baby, we’ll be happy. Then everything will be okay.”

One night in early March Harriet awoke and discovered herself suddenly enormous. The sheets and blankets were soaking wet, wrapped around her sore, swollen thighs like the leaves of a cabbage. She felt surfeited and overindulged, washed up drunk on a beach somewhere, entangled with rubbery brown polyps and plankton. She reached for the bedside lamp and knocked aluminum cake tins onto the floor, ice-cream containers, extinguished cookie packets. She tried to sit up and failed. Then, again, on the count of three. She peeled the damp sheets from her legs. Suddenly, she was sitting up. She was sitting on the edge of the bed.

Silver shapes glided around the bedroom, as if the moon were riding a carousel. She looked through the gauzy drapes at the freeway, headlights skirling past, an entire universe filled with history and blind intention. She knew it before she heard it, like the shape of an extracted tooth, intimate and strange.

Somewhere deep inside the house the voice said:

This is it. Here we go. It’s time.

“I know,” Harriet said. “You don’t have to tell me. I already know.”

Boyd was getting out of bed. He was already wearing his Levi’s and pulling on a blue T-shirt.

“Just relax and stay calm,” Boyd said, guiding her down the front stairs, dispensing an aroma of Old Spice and Vaseline. Their car was idling in the driveway, a ’55 Chevy Custom Chief with whitewall tires and padded dash. It was filled with animal patience, like something slumbering in a cave.

Then Harriet was in the car. Boyd adjusted her seat and pulled a small perforated wool blanket across her knees. She watched her fat, freckled hands in her lap.

The voice said, We’ll be there in a few minutes, so try to relax. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Pretty soon, you’ll have everything you’ve ever wanted. And then it’ll all be yours.

“Is it really?” Harriet asked. Boyd was slamming the trunk and wiping the rear windshield with a soggy paper towel. “Is this what I’ve been waiting for? I knew I was waiting for something, but I guess I never knew what it was.”