Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

“No!” she said, kicking him under the table. They were eating an early breakfast of pancakes at the Piehole, a diner on Mass Ave., before Viv’s bus back to Weldon. She wanted to be back in plenty of time to get a good seat for Tessa Callahan’s speech. She’d invited Wayne to come along. He’d declined, blaming work.

“What I meant was,” Viv went on, keeping one of her legs pressed against his, “that it’s hard to imagine calling a baby Wayne. It’s strictly a grown man’s name. Was it a family name or something?”

He was always ready for this. “I’m named after an old cowboy. I grew up in Montana, remember?”

As a boy, his favorite book had been The Illustrated Cowboy Encyclopedia , originally published in 1949. He’d found it gathering dust on a back shelf of the Havre Elementary Library, checked it out, and never returned it. Wayne Bridger was the toughest cowboy in the book, a loner known to strangle snakes with his bare hands and sleep in snow caves he’d built himself.

The ISA allowed employees to choose their own name for an assignment, or they’d generate one for each person. Over his two decades of working for them, Wayne had always let his employer choose. What did it matter? Choosing your own required filling out a tedious form for the pricks of the Inner Panel, who ran the ISA, and Wayne preferred to have as little contact with them as possible.

But for the last assignment of his career, he’d felt compelled to submit the old cowboy’s name. The Inner Panel approved. Wayne had been in the top four hundred male names given to male infants in 1995, his designated birth year for this assignment, making it plausible but not obvious. Then they’d assigned him to Vivian Summer Bourne, a senior at Weldon College and child of accelerated gestation who’d begun presenting negative physical symptoms four months ago. Thinning skin, hair depigmentation, rapid decrease of bone density.

The usual signs.

But God, she was so beautiful. Sitting across from her now, he didn’t even register any of the new wrinkles near her eyes or the slight slackening of her neckline.

Hard to believe he’d only known her for four months.

“Of course I remember that you grew up in Montana,” said Viv. “Women love biographical details. It’s an intimacy-builder for us. For men, not as much.”

“Oh?” Wayne lifted his eyebrows, feigning fascination. He loved teasing Viv about her all-women’s college.

“I’m serious .” Viv lightly kicked him under the table, then kept her leg pressed to his. “You guys are more broad-brush in your sexuality. Details turn women on. You should come with me to the Tessa Callahan thing. It’ll be hot.”

He reached for her knee under the table and massaged it. Remembered it was her left leg and went softer. It was the one with the titanium pin inside.

“Remind me who she is again?” he said. He didn’t even have to pretend he didn’t know, or will himself to forget he’d sat next to Tessa on the plane two days ago. The lie was effortless, required no thought; he’d gotten that good at his job.

“Are you kidding me, Bridger?” Vivian said, dipping a piece of pancake in a small ceramic bowl of syrup. “Do I really have to tell you who Tessa Callahan is?” Wayne found this detail inexplicably endearing, how she primly dunked each bite so that the stack on her plate didn’t get soggy. Then again, he found most things about her endearing. He was in trouble.

“She’s an, uh…” He pretended to consider. “Feminist porn star?”

“You wish,” said Viv, whacking his shin with her toe again. “Seriously. She’s only one of the most important feminist thinkers of my generation .”

“Oh, right. Can you just remind me what her thoughts are?”

“She’s a sort of Silicon Valley guru. Runs biotech companies. She’s figuring out a way for pregnancy to be easier.”

“Isn’t it already pretty easy? Don’t you just wait around for nine months, getting massages and letting people give you their seats?”

She sighed theatrically, trying not to smile. “You’re hopeless,” she said, and kicked him again.

A server set the bill down between them. Wayne swiped it off the table while Viv was still rummaging in her purse.

“Hey,” she protested, “I was going to get this one.”

“Nope. The man always pays, little lady,” he said, exaggerating a Western drawl.

“Watch your language, cowboy. Talking like that will get you skewered at Weldon.”

“Speaking of which,” he said. “Why don’t you skip going to Weldon this morning? Come back home with me and take a nap instead.”

“Tempting, but no. We can rain check the nap, but Tessa Callahan reschedules for no one. She’s possibly the busiest woman in America.”

“Well, she can come take a nap with us, too. Sounds like she needs the rest.”

“Very funny, Bridger.”

He held her elbow as they crossed the restaurant, noticing her gait, which was still slightly uneven from her injury. She’d told him she was doing physical therapy twice a week and never complained of any pain. Still, the more time they spent together, the harder it was to witness her limp. He was plenty familiar with broken bones. That broken leg of hers had to be throbbing sometimes. He wished she’d tell him when it hurt.

Out on the sidewalk, both of them jacketed against the cool spring morning, Wayne pulled her into his arms and kissed her, closing his eyes to blot out everything but the feel of her, both taut and soft beneath her sweater, and her scent, a touch floral from the lavender oil she used, underpinned with a distant tang of dried sweat, a reminder of the night they’d just spent together.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

“One more sec,” he said, not letting go of her. “Tessa Callahan can wait.”

He ran his hands down her sides, between her jacket and sweater, savoring the curve of her.

“We’re in public, you know,” she said, and giggled, but she didn’t remove his hands.

This was the time in Wayne’s day he relished the most. The mornings even more than the nights (amazing as they’d recently been), because kissing her goodbye on the street, with any passerby to notice, was an act of public honesty. With his eyes shut and his awareness contained entirely in the realm of Vivian, everything felt simple and true, exactly what it appeared to be: a young couple, newly in love on a perfect spring morning. He could almost forget all the nights he’d lain awake in bed, Viv’s breath deep and steady against him, trying to calculate how much time she had left, wondering where she would be when it happened. Not if he would lose her—because he certainly would—but precisely how.

But for now it was morning, and she was warm and alive in his arms, and he could almost forget the future.

2021

“Seahorse does not imply that the female biology is imperfect,” said Tessa from the podium, looking at the crowd of Weldon undergraduates before her, young women of all shades and shapes and sizes, from all corners of the world, dressed in everything from ripped jeans to tailored dresses to hijabs and saris. “Because it is perfect, indeed. The flaws that Seahorse strives to address are the drastic imperfections of our unreasonable culture. A culture that, increasingly, expects women to ‘do it all.’ Yes, our voices are louder than ever. We are leading corporations, communities, governments. We are leading research in the sciences, making incredible contributions to the arts. We are side by side with men in our military, some of us on the front lines of battle. We are, in short, killing it .”