Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

Willie and I are left in the profound vacuum of silence that occurs after a group of people leave a room. Willie sits innocently on the floor as if it were a normal Sunday. His legs slide independent of the rest of him through sheaves of the Sunday paper filled with rampant disease in ravaged countries, murder, and the economy. He slides toward me through strewn papers while outside the day’s sleepy Sunday glaze that says stay inside and consider life from a distance has become suspect too.

Willie holds my face in his hands and says, “You are so beautiful.”

“So? What of it?” I say. “What were you trying to tell me in front of a group of people that you were too scared to tell me in private?”

“What do you mean, so ? What is that? So.” He stalls, sprawling in the swish and crinkle of paper, among the politicians and killers.

“Ella’s your child,” I say. Just like that, so quickly, but I realize I’ve been waiting to say this sentence all morning. I ruffle the pages of the book review, clinging to the usual routine, as if everything weren’t irrevocably different. There’s an ad for a bestseller that Margaret told me she read about a serial killer who keeps the tongues of young women, indistinguishable in pickling jars, on the windowsill in his bathroom. They are blackening specimens, severed from their language.

Willie closes his eyes, and before the rush of everything else that I know I will feel, I am overcome with knowing this man so well that I intuited all of this from a comment he made at brunch to a group of four other people. More than rage, more than anything, this connection makes us not really alone for a moment, makes us as close to each other as we’ll ever be.

“Yes,” he says cautiously. He’s past the moment of connectedness to wondering how he should feel now that he’s been found out.

What to do with this information? He donated his sperm to his ex-girlfriend five years ago, before I’d even met him. Why didn’t he tell me? Maybe it became one of those reels in his mind that he was too tired to pass on, seemingly unimportant, less and less important as the years went by. What does it even mean? Am I supposed to yell and tear my hair out? Sometimes you just do nothing for a while. Willie stands up, circles around me in order to massage the perpetually tight spot underneath my right shoulder blade, pressing hard to release something deep inside.

“Don’t do that,” I say.

“I worship you.” He gets down on his knees and mock-worships, kissing my bare feet and bowing his head in deference. He puts his arm around me and I feel the warmth of him that over the course of the day, over the course of weeks and months and years, has left and then returns, leaves and returns, leaves and returns. “I want to have a baby with you,” he says, his face in my neck.

“Get off me.” I shrug him off. I get up and walk toward the sink filled with dishes from the brunch, which seems like years ago now, not sure what to do next. I pick up an apple, consider taking a bite and then drop it. It bounces red against the kitchen floor until it’s bruised.

“I’m going out,” I say. Willie knows not to come with me. He knows not even to speak. I take the pregnancy book I bought at the used bookstore in our neighborhood with me. I get on the subway and read from an interview with a pregnant woman who talks about sleeping while pregnant. “I am most myself when I am sound asleep,” she says. “I wish that I could talk in a dream to my unborn baby.”

A young couple not unlike Willie and me sit at the opposite end of the car. They have lots of scrap metal in a bag and a ladder, which they’ve unfolded so it stands upright in front of them. A man dressed in urine-soaked burlap bags wakes up from a nap at the other end of the car and walks over, considers the ladder, and begins to climb.

My life, this revelation, is not a catastrophe. I know that the secret of Ella will eventually be absorbed into the narrative of our relationship. She will become our secret together, and though there will be tears and we will be changed, we will remain inextricably intertwined.

I get off the subway and walk home, taking my time, in order to cover some terrain without Willie. When I get there, Willie’s in bed reading the rest of the paper. I linger between my clothes and my nightgown while Willie watches from the bed. The way he studies me each night like this fills me with significance, but tonight I won’t look back.

At work on Friday, there was a tall man wearing loose khaki pants, with broad shoulders, sent by a distributor to set up a display of Macao patio furniture. He carried settees, armchairs, tables, through the front door of the store to the back where the display was, setting them down in an arrangement he thought was best. I watched him move back and forth, smiling at him as if Willie didn’t exist, flirting silently until I tripped over my own feet and lurched toward a blue china vase with a tight waist that holds pencils.

There are my own fantasies: all my old lovers in one room. I walk in — surprise! — triumphant, always a little thinner and filled with good news of myself. These men in one room — short and tall, goofy and sophisticated, older and younger, those with whom I might have had a child. But these are just fantasies when I look down at the familiar thick bones of my body, at the veins pushing at the surface of the skin on the inside of my arm, twigs trapped beneath ice.

“That was a stupid way to tell me about Ella,” I say, even though I told him .

“I know,” he says. “I was going to tell you years ago, but then the miscarriage…It’s stupid. I thought you knew, that we had an understanding.”

“Out loud,” I say, overenunciating. “I need to understand it officially and out loud.”

“So now it’s official?”

“Don’t get so comfortable. This may take a while. I’ll need you to explain.”

“Well,” he begins.

“Not now.”

We fall asleep not touching, and I dream that the baby we could have is inside me made of glass. I walk carefully and don’t make any sudden moves. I realize I will have to hold still so it can slide out cold and whole. I clear a space on a shelf, move books and a framed picture to make room for the glass baby. I wake up terrified, the antiseptic smell of a hospital in my nostrils.

“It’s normal to have dreams like this,” Willie says when I wake him up. His head is still on the pillow and he speaks in a whisper though there is no one else to wake up. He’s always done this, as if he knew someday it would be necessary.

“I read an interview in that pregnancy book,” Willie says hopefully, now that he’s got my attention back. “A woman told the interviewer that she felt a strong beam of love. ‘I felt as if I were shining my light on the relationship with my husband,’ she said.”

I imagine her flashing her high beams on her husband, caught unaware on the road. “A few chapters later,” I say, “she tells her that she never imagined she could feel so sick.”

“Great,” he says. I fit myself reluctantly into Willie’s outstretched arms, putting my head on his chest the way we always do at the beginning of the night though we will end up on opposite sides of the bed by morning.

I remember waving out the window as a child from a baby-sitter’s arms as my parents left in a swirl of soap and perfume for a party. I forgot them while they were gone and thrilled at their return. It is that animalistic thrill that is my initial desire. That someone that small would smell the air instinctively for my scent, and thrill at my return. There are pictures of Willie as a child where he is stiff with that kind of excitement and anticipation.