Lauren Fox - Send for Me

Annelise has nothing to add to the conversation. She absently fingers her brooch and looks over at Walter, who is alternating his intent gaze between her parents.

She shifts in her chair and feels a little trickle of blood moving through her. In school, Emmi and Sofie would whisper their dramatic complaints every month: the hassle, the extra washing, the inconvenience of it. They were always so exasperated by it. But Lise finds it fascinating. How remarkable to be able to chart your own internal course, to receive a regular reminder from your body: you are here, you are ready.

Walter and her parents are still talking, although they seem to have changed subjects, thankfully. A mutual friend in Belgium? The weather? A mutual friend enjoying the weather in Belgium? She crosses her legs and closes her eyes for a second and sees a negative image of the living room in front of her: fireplace, bookcase, table lamps glowing, mirror, her parents, Walter.

She feels herself growing more distracted, fighting the distinct feeling that she’s done this before, that her life is both hers and not hers, slight jolts surrounded by cotton wool.

He really is so good and lovely. And handsome. Dark hair, dark eyes, his dark-gray suit. He takes her to dinner every week, sometimes to a concert or a film. He asks her opinion on everything and does not talk too much about shoes. During those evenings she wonders if he will surprise her. He’s been to France, twice. He talks about Berlin, as Max had, but as a place to visit. She likes his gathering laughter, his instinct to laugh.

She runs her toe along the edge of the rug beneath her chair and notices that the living room has fallen silent.

“What do you think, Annelise?” her mother asks, and Annelise blushes.

“I’m sorry! I wasn’t paying attention,” she says, and then after a moment she laughs, because it doesn’t matter; she knows she is loved by everyone in the room.

“Our dreamer,” her father says.

Walter meets her eyes. “I will have to work on my conversational skills,” he says, and Annelise thinks she can feel the heat from him, the love he feels for her, and the wanting.

“No,” her mother says, her hand on Walter’s arm, squeezing. “Your conversational skills are delightful!” She presses her lips together and glares at Annelise. “Aren’t they, Lise?” Her father raises his glass to Walter and drinks.

It’s almost comical, the way they’re releasing her to him. They make it seem inevitable. But nothing is inevitable, not one single thing, not the kind of jam you spread on your toasted bread in the morning nor the way you tuck your hair behind your ear at the exact second he is looking at you, nor the moment two bodies come together to conceive a child, particular and astonishing.

Her mother’s hand still rests on Walter’s arm. Her father leans forward in his chair, offers their guest more brandy.

Annelise feels an ancient pull toward safety. A bottle clinks to a glass. In the room there is quiet assent, a low murmuring.

I have sorted your things, Lise. I will send them .

The first time she’s pregnant, Annelise feels like a member of a secret club. Even before the growing baby inside her is visible to anyone but her and Walter, she walks around her neighborhood, noticing the other members of the Secret Society of the Life-Givers (or, possibly, depending on the day, the Sisterhood of the Swollen Ankles): women who furtively touch a palm to their bellies or place a steadying hand on their aching backs; women so large and heavy they look like they might give birth right there on the sidewalk; women with barely rounded stomachs who pause, stop to shake a stone out of a shoe or pretend to study a street sign—the ones who, like her, need to rest for a moment, sit on a bench and catch their breath.

And she notices, too, all the children—how did they just appear like that, out of nowhere?—all of the beautiful children and the strange, plump, wobbling toddlers; the drooling, gummy babies gnawing on damp remnants of bread rolls; the fat, laughing babies and the silently staring ones. And (although this really shouldn’t shock her) they all have mothers—coiffed women with thin lips, tired eyes; harried women with quick reflexes, hands on their children’s heads, arms, shoulders, wrists ( stay here! Stay right here! ); tranquil women whose soft bodies are like furniture for their babies, like pillowy sofas.

They are everywhere, these children and their mothers, and Annelise never saw any of them before. But now she does. Now she sees them. And the patient mothers will hold their arms open to her. She will fall into this great chasm gently, and be received.

Her own mother has been in a tizzy of excitement since they told her the news, stopping by every day to add to the list of things the baby will need. But they’re six months away from needing anything for this baby, and Annelise has to bite her lip to stop herself from telling her to please calm down.

(Her own mother: of course they’ve worked side by side at the bakery, and Klara has cooked for her and wrapped her sandwiches in kitchen paper and washed her clothes and nagged her to sweep the floor and kissed her forehead and run a hand down her unruly hair with an exasperated tsk, but it has never occurred to Annelise that this is motherhood. If she does consider Klara, it’s with a suffusion of ineffable feeling rather than careful analysis, and in that rush of feeling is the sense that she is her mother—that when she looks in the mirror and sees her own face, she sees Klara’s face, too, although not literally, because they don’t look alike. Their connection is a deep and wordless blend of boiled potatoes and unsolicited advice, a lullaby about a dog, a sick stomach gently rubbed in the middle of the night, an argument about a hat: vexation and resentment and warmth and need, a viscous flow of liquid, imperfect love.)

—

The weeks go by slowly. Four months along, she feels the first flutters, so easily mistaken for something else, but unmistakably what they are. Hello, she thinks. It’s thrilling and almost preposterous.

Her energy drains, but her vision sharpens. She sees the deadly risks and danger she’d been impervious to before: cars and bicycles whizzing past her on busy streets, trees with heavy, low-hanging branches, men who narrow their eyes and look too long. The bench she liked to sit on, outside the fruit market, that she is no longer permitted to sit on.

(The municipal parks she is no longer allowed to enjoy. The restaurants at which she may no longer dine. The swimming pools where, should she desire a cool dip, she may not swim. She exists—they all do—in this liminal state of bitter confusion, in the warped moment of watching a water glass slip out of a hand, staring at the winking shards that had been, seconds ago, solid, the memory of the drinking glass more real, more true, than its fragments.)

—

She sleeps late one Tuesday morning—a delicious luxury she allows herself now that she is married and no longer works at the bakery, one of the few she’ll indulge in for the rest of her life. She wakes slowly, untangles herself from a dream, yawns, stretches. She opens her bedroom curtains and sees a long-limbed child wearing only underwear playing in the courtyard. He looks up, and for a second, their eyes meet, then he bends and gathers a clump of dirt in his fist, brings it up to his face. He shoves some of the dirt into his mouth, licks his lips, smiles at her. A little ball of fear forms in her chest. She imagines a wolf mama slipping through the fence, hot breath of raw meat, skulking into the courtyard to collect her child. A moment later, a human mother in a flowered skirt rushes over to him and scoops him up, and Annelise hears the boy’s feral scream.