Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

Here’s my one-week dance-music self-study boot-camp syllabus. From the seventies, we begin with a formal analysis of Donna Summer singing “I Feel Love.” Moving her bad-girl hips and looking up at the lord in that wicked, innocent way she has. Boom, done. We move on to the total sonar-echo funkosity of the Talking Heads doing “Take Me to the River.” Boom. We decide to turn up the volume slightly, because everything sounds better louder. From the eighties, we rediscover Chaka Khan doing “Ain’t Nobody,” with carbon-neutral keyboard sequences by Hawk Wolinski, and “Talking in Your Sleep” by the Romantics, boom, living in a spotlight, boom. Then the Fixx, very tight, doing “Saved by Zero.” Then Midnight Star, “No Parking on the Dance Floor” and “Operator,” boom, boom, “Operator, this is an emergency.” We begin to feel a powerful sense of obligation: we must dance . Then we study the inscrutable a cappella chord that begins “She’s Strange” by Cameo, and we try unsuccessfully to make harmonic sense of the meanderingly slow arousing siren wail that follows. Next we turn our attention to the Crystal Method doing “Vapor Trail,” which seems to be about smoking crack although there are no words and it’s just as good sober, boom diddly boom. We turn up the volume further and spend an hour worshipping the chorus of Underworld’s “Always Loved a Film,” and then we bring the noise with Benny Benassi’s remix of Public Enemy, boom. We sit cross-legged, devoting an afternoon to the greatness of Hol Baumann doing “Bénarès” and Mercan Dede doing “Ab-i Hayat”—boom, boom, dakka doom, doom sa, comme ça — and then we pound our delighted hippocampuses with Eric Prydz’s ode to the piano, “Pjanoo.” At the final reception cast party we all dance to George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” until we must chase the cat. Then we collapse in orgiastic confusion, knowing that we have a good solid foundation for getting down on it. Tuition: the cost of fifteen songs on iTunes.

• • •

ROZ JUST LEFT. I’m in shock. I said, “Before we look at the barn and get all sad, I want to try out a song on you.” I played her my Guantanamo song, which I’d fiddled with a bit. She dipped her knees to it here and there, which pleased me. After it was over, she said, “It’s got a great dance beat, but I’m honestly just not sure about the Guantanamo part, because it’s so upbeat and cheerful that it seems as if you’re almost making fun of Guantanamo, which is surely not what you mean. Guantanamo is a terrible prison where people are forced to waste their lives. Shouldn’t the song be something more like — I don’t know, ‘I saw you on the dance floor, / I never wanted anything more, / I bought a rubber at the corner store’?”

“That’s it!” I said, writing her lyrics on a folded-up piece of paper. I also played her a fresh version of the doctor song. She liked that one.

Then I showed her the missing barn floor and the squashed-flat canoe, which was still out on the grass. She surprised me by starting to cry.

“It moved so smoothly over the water,” she said.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said, holding her. “I’m sorry the barn failed. I’m sorry about the canoe. I’m sorry things turned out this way. Come inside, let’s not look at this anymore. I’ve got a bottle of blackstrap molasses for you.”

She looked up at me. Then she gave me the shock. It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t about Harris the doctor.

• • •

“I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,” she said. “It technically doesn’t affect you, but it does.”

“What?” I steeled myself. If she was going to say she was engaged, I simply wasn’t going to accept it.

She said, “I think I’m going to have a hysterectomy.”

My mouth opened and closed. “You mean they’re going to—” I didn’t finish.

“Remove it,” she said. “Not my ovaries, just the, ah, uterus. Just the center of it all.”

I stared at her, horrified.

“I told you it’s not cancer, it’s really not,” Roz said. “Sweetie, don’t look at me that way. It’s not malignant, and I’m not going to die. I have uterine growths called fibroids. Lots of women have them and they’re usually not a problem. But I’ve got, it turns out, a whole bunch of them, in a knot — like a baobob tree. You know that big tree in Avatar ? That’s what it feels like I’ve got in me.”

“How absolutely awful.” I clutched her arm. “And there’s no other way?”

“We’ve tried several things, they were a waste of time. The gynecologist has been telling me I should have the hysterectomy right away, but I’ve resisted it. She says I’ll feel ten times better if we go ahead — the bloodletting will stop, the pain will stop, the anemia will go away. The fibroid is giving me the horrible periods, because it’s so big and gnarly. It means well, but it’s killing me.”

“You poor dear thing.”

“My last hope was that I’d hit menopause and it would disappear on its own. But no luck. It loves estrogen. It just keeps on growing. And it aches.”

“Oh, baby,” I said. I put my arms around her. “Have you told Harris?”

“Harris is a minimalist and he’s been telling me I should wait and exhaust every alternative — he’s been a bit rigid on the subject, actually. But now even he’s saying I should do it. I probably should have had it done a year ago.”

“Come on inside,” I said. “Let me make some tea.”

We walked into the house. “I know I’m really too old to have a baby,” she said, “but to lose your own womb — the place where little babies grow—” She held back her grief. “It’s just so final. Sorry.”

“Sh, sh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. As I stroked her arm I was seized by a paroxysm of remorse. This was my fault. I put some water on the stove, thinking furiously. “Can I feel it?” I said.

“No, Paul. Please. It’s private.”

“I know, forget it, I’m sorry. It’s just that we should have had a kid. We’d be together now if we’d had a kid, and you wouldn’t have this horrible feeling of finality. I’m so sorry.”

Roz said, “I’d probably still be facing this whether or not we’d had a child. You didn’t want to have a child when I wanted to and so we didn’t. That’s just what happened.”

I put a tea bag in a mug. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, probably nothing. I just have to face up to it, and I thought you should know.” She smiled at me through tears. “You could hold me.”

I held her and stroked her back. I felt the wrinkles in her shirt and the slight thickness of her bra clasp.

“And I’ll take that bottle of molasses,” she said.

OH, ME. That good, good woman. I spent all morning reading the message boards in hysterectomy support groups. A lot of women said that having a hysterectomy was the best decision they’d ever made. Others were unhappy because they’d wanted to have a second child, or a third child. Or just a child.

Once on a hot night when Roz and I were watching a documentary called Dark Days , I got the big square fan and plugged it in and said we could cool our loins with it. Then I asked her whether women had loins, as men did. Was it a gender-neutral term? She said, “I think so, technically. It’s anything in the upper thigh area and anything that is carried or tucked away between the thighs.” Then she said, “When I was little I always misread ‘loin cloth’ as ‘lion cloth.’ I thought Hercules killed the lion and then wore the fur over his privates. The dyslexic mistake is part of the meaning.”

“He girded his lion,” I said. I turned on the fan. The documentary was about people living in shacks in an underground rail tunnel in New York City. It was a very good movie, but it made Roz sad. Here is a world with so much disparity and so much striving and suffering, she thought, and what am I doing with my life? I think that movie was part of what got her to apply for the producer job at the radio show.