Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

“What can he do?” I ask pointedly. I give Willie a what-are-you-talking-about look.

“He can educate himself,” Willie says. “He can find things out.” And then I recognize the tone in his voice — it’s the urgent tone he uses when he wants to make a point based on his own experience but he only half-tells because whatever it is he actually experienced is a secret. What he’s really saying is that I’m about to find something out, the something that he’s half-telling me now. He’s giving me that look that says he loves me and we’ll talk about all of this later. He’s prepping me for something he’s been meaning to tell me all along. “He can know the woman so well that he participates alongside her,” he says. He looks at me as if this is a promise, and I want to punch him.

This morning just before everyone arrived, I found a picture of Ella with a note from Louise saying hello, asking Willie to say hello to me. Nothing threatening, but there was Ella with a face so like Willie’s boyhood face that I’d pointed it out, held it up to Willie. The doorbell rang, and Willie just nodded, holding up a hold-that-thought finger as he walked away from me to answer the door.

Ella is Louise’s five-year-old child, and Louise is Willie’s ex-girlfriend, the girlfriend before me, the one who might have been with Willie now if it hadn’t been for a few random incidents. Before I met her, I turned her face into the sweetest porcelain doll in my mind; her hair curly like curly sheep hair; her breasts sweet nectarines. Then I met her, and she was kind, married with a child, and living far, far away, on the other side of the country. Because her husband was infertile, Louise used donated sperm to have Ella, whom I met only that once when she was a toddler. Her round face then was a generic sweet pudge, not the little-girl version of Willie’s I saw this morning in the picture.

“Let’s make a pact,” Jake says suddenly. “We’ll all start smoking again when we’re seventy.”

Margaret turns her back on him and says to Rachel, “Have you been eating food like eating is inevitable, like it’s fate? There was a piece of pizza sitting on somebody’s desk, somebody I barely know, the other day at work, and I felt drawn to it.”

“So what did you do?” Rachel asks.

“I ate it.”

It’s often on Sundays, the bare day stretched before us, that Willie and I discuss the possibilities. Though I organized the brunch, I was looking forward to after everyone had left, to the quiet afternoon hours alone with Willie when we could remind ourselves of the infinite times decisions like this were made before us — a decision my mother and father made in Georgia or Rhode Island or Colorado, a decision made all across the country as they looked for a permanent home, the right place, the perfect place they never found, until they decided at a certain point that now was as good a time as any, and this place would do as well as anywhere else, and then my mother watched her body grow, fill with a thing alive.

“I’m reading this book,” Margaret says. Everyone groans. Margaret is always reading some book that claims to be the definitive whatever. “No, really,” she says. “It’s one of many, I promise. I’m a multisource woman these days. Pregnancy has changed me.”

Jake nods mock-vigorously and Margaret mock-punches him. “I’ve read that book,” Jake says. “There’s a ritual called couvade. The man takes to his bed to simulate the delivery of a child as the woman is actually giving birth.”

“Oh, great,” Rachel says. “I can picture Ralph now — feet up in silk-laced stirrups as nubile young women feed him grapes while somewhere a creepy doctor is prepping me for an episiotomy.”

Willie and I have reached that certain point; we are married three years, him with a steady job teaching high school English, me a floor hostess at an imported furniture company. It’s not what I’d planned for myself in my mid-thirties, but for now it’s fine. Willie and I read a lot; we go to the movies; we take long walks after work. My job has very little to do with my real life.

“I still don’t believe either of you is pregnant,” Willie says, getting up to get more coffee. “It’s too perfect.” He raises an eyebrow the way only he can. “What are you really here to tell us?”

Now I’m in the mood for a fight. What if I miscarry again? turns easily into What hasn’t he told me? Who is this man? How can anyone really know anyone else? And I’m right back to How are we ever going to have children if we’re total strangers?

“Okay, okay,” Rachel says. “We’re really aliens. We want your firstborn.”

“There must be something in the water,” Jake says, holding out his coffee cup for more. “You better look out, Tanya.” He squeezes my knee.

Willie looks over and he’s smiling that smile again, that smile that tells me we’ll talk about all of this later and that he loves me, that we want our firstborn too. But I’m not having any of it. I look away.

“I had a dream we converted our house into a big meat factory,” Rachel says. “It was a huge success — people came from all around. It was awkward for other people in the neighborhood. There was tension. Our meat factory wasn’t entirely welcome.”

“Mmmm,” Ralph says, feeding himself a strip of bacon. “Meat.”

“Pregnancy dreams are the weirdest — I dreamed last night that I built a huge hand-painted cabinet for Willie and Tanya,” Margaret says. “You guys didn’t want it — you said it wouldn’t fit in your apartment. But it was really clear that even if you did have room you didn’t want it.”

“It’s true, no room at all,” I say to Margaret, waving a hand around the apartment but wanting Willie to hear my tone, read into my words. No room for Ella, no room for Louise.

Yesterday at work a woman and a man walked into the store, their bodies jostling each other affectionately. The woman’s breasts bounced slightly under her T-shirt as she carried them in on folded arms. The man was tucked safely inside his clothes. They walked as if they knew where they were going, and I curbed the automatic cheek-straining smile my boss insists upon, so as not to intrude. I watched them finger wrought-iron candlesticks and wondered if Willie was thinking of me at that very moment. I realized, not for the first time, that there are countless details in my day that I don’t tell Willie. I wished I could transmit all those images that rush through my mind into his mind at the end of the day when I’m too tired to explain; those reels and reels of time when my mind runs wild that he knows nothing about. I wished he could do the same thing for me — the yearnings of our whorish brains captured and transmitted. Sometimes I just stand at the front of the store and yearn for things I can’t articulate, and Willie doesn’t know anything about it. How can we have a baby if he doesn’t know about that yearning? If I can’t describe it to him?

“It’s just that time of life,” Margaret announces, putting her hand over her tea-filled mug as Willie comes toward her with the coffeepot. “The age of having babies. I keep wondering, How did I get old enough for this?”

“I know,” Rachel says. “There used to be so much time ahead of us. Pregnancy makes me think of death. Do you think that’s bad for the baby?”

“I’ll drink coffee for the both of us,” Ralph says, ignoring Rachel’s question. He holds out his cup.

“I see your pregnancy plane has already taken off, Ralph,” Rachel says. Rachel always said she never wanted children and now she’s pregnant.

Soon brunch is over. I hurry everyone out. I stop Ralph from doing the dishes. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. I’m so happy for you. Call me. It’s wonderful. So wonderful. It’s amazing. Kiss kiss kiss kiss.