Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

Penny left before he knew she was there.

A few months afterwards she saw Irene, too, at the grocery store. Their carts almost collided in the cereal aisle. It was early spring but still cold, and Irene was wearing a long padded jacket and white boots; her eyes widened as she took in the sight of Penny's pregnant belly, bulging through her unbuttoned coat. When Penny said her name, the landlady looked up at her.

“When are you due, dear?” she said.

“At the end of May.”

“Are you getting lots of rest? Rest is important, you know.”

“I'm doing fine,” Penny said. She put a hand on her stomach, a gesture that had grown quickly habitual with her, a means of instant comfort. Watching tension twist the muscles of Irene's face, she knew what must be going through her mind: all the advice, the recommendations and recipes, suggested names, tips on feeding and baby furniture, the knowledge of years. The older woman's face was almost pulsing with the longing to share it. Penny steeled herself to receive the onslaught, balancing her weight on both feet, knowing she might be standing there in the aisle for a while. But Irene just stood there, smiling thinly, fixed to the linoleum.

“How's Henry?” Penny finally asked.

“He's been fitted for a new aid,” Irene said. “But he won't hardly wear it. He says he's gotten used to the silence. He says he likes the peace and quiet. Well, good luck, dear.” And with a pivot of her grocery cart she turned around and walked away. Penny was left looking after her, then gazing up at the rows of cereals and granola bars. She'd forgotten what she came into this section to buy.

After this encounter, Irene did not call or visit. She must have thought about it, though. In fact she must've thought about it a great deal. Because in June, after the baby was born, she could not stay away. Penny was sitting by the window, enjoying the first warm breeze of summer while she nursed the baby, when a car pulled up in the driveway. She heard a door slam shut, and saw Irene coming up the driveway, carrying one of her baked goods, the sun reflecting brilliantly off the silver foil. Her shiny face was set in determination as she came to confront the unceasing wonders, the mysteries of sex and circumstance, that had brought her to the house again.

Leda calls on a Saturday afternoon to announce she's getting married the following Thursday night. “Can you come?” she asks, her voice as innocent as milk.

Cordless in hand, Nathalie moves over to the garage, where Nick is thrashing away at a rocking chair with a piece of sandpaper. He refuses to use the electric sander because he says he can't really feel the wood. He's turning into the Michelangelo of home improvement. When he sees her come in, he raises his eyebrows and puts up his palm in the standard I'm-not-here gesture he uses whenever his mother's on the phone.

“We wouldn't miss it,” Nathalie says.

“We are very, very pleased,” Leda says, making this “we” sound royal. Nick, whacking at the chair, keeps almost missing the arm of it, threatening to take off a layer of his own skin instead. “Martin will be thrilled.”

“How is Martin?”

“A prouder bridegroom you never saw,” Leda says.

Nathalie smiles at this; she likes Martin. He's a retired medical instrument salesman who wears threadbare cardigans and tells old-fashioned, sexist jokes. The last one she heard involved three women together in a jail cell — a Navajo, an Arapaho and a “regular ho, from Dallas.” It's the “from Dallas” that makes her like him. Martin will be Leda's fourth husband, and coincidentally he was also her second. They were married on a whim, by a captain on a cruise ship, and divorced six months later after an argument at a party.

“Can we, you know, do anything?” Nathalie says.

“You're a dear,” Leda says, “but I'll go over this with my darling son. Could you put him on?” Nathalie holds the phone out to Nick, who shakes his head. They pantomine this back and forth — her holding, him shaking — until she hears Leda sigh pointedly on the other end. Then she drops the phone into Nick's dust-covered lap and goes back into the house.

Leda was married to Nick's father for twenty-seven years. Since he died, she's taken up marrying the way some women take up art classes or volunteer work. First it was Martin, then it was her ob-gyn — Rupert Thorne, whom everybody called by both names, including Leda, even after they were married — and now it's Martin again. For each of the weddings so far, Leda has gone whole hog, without regard for the fact that she is neither a first-time nor a youthful bride. (On the cruise ship she managed to rustle up a long white dress and a headdress made of orchids, which they apparently sold in the onboard boutique to people given to just such marital whims, and she'd browbeaten the ship's yoga instructor into serving as the maid of honor.) Each time, she says that when she was younger she didn't appreciate her wedding, and she might as well enjoy it now. This drives Nick insane. He says she's gone off the edge. Nathalie wonders, never out loud, if Nick's the best judge of the edge's location. He lost his consulting job a year ago and hasn't been able to find new work; for the past few months, instead of looking, he has been gutting their entire house and its contents. He's into stripping things down: walls, chairs, floors. He wants everything to be authentic and unadorned. Their house, he says, has a skeletal identity that has been wrongfully and deliberately obscured over the years of its inhabitation. At Home Depot, the clerks call him by name.

When he comes out of the garage his face is dark with annoyance. He sits down on the couch in their living room, which was once wallpapered and carpeted and now is fully exposed, down to a brick wall on one side and the bare pine boards beneath their feet. At least the upholstery's still on the furniture, though Nathalie doesn't count on it sticking around for long. She wouldn't be surprised to come home and find it all reduced to wire and string.

“You won't believe what she wants,” he says. “A full-on church wedding, just like the last two. I don't even know where she found a place this fast.”

“It's the off-season, I guess,” Nathalie says.

“And you know what else? She wants me to give her away. I said, ‘Mom, I think you're old enough by now to give yourself away.’ ”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I know, Nicholas’ ”—here he shifts into a disturbingly accurate falsetto imitation of Leda's sweetest tone of voice—“ ‘but it would mean a lot to me.’ ”

“So you're going to do it.”

“Of course I am,” he says. “She'd kill me if I didn't.”

The next few days are an avalanche of last-minute activity, Leda calling Nathalie every twenty minutes at work, Nick calling every ten to complain about Leda. He and his mother bicker constantly, being so much alike, each of them obsessed with detail, having infinite attention spans for logistics. Whenever Leda comes over, Nick parades her through the house, talking about joists and finishes, and his mother not only nods but asks questions that make it clear she's processing the information. This is when Nathalie retreats to the kitchen — as yet untouched, thank God — and listens to Martin tell jokes about ho's.

When Nick and Nathalie got married, he and Leda took charge of everything: the flower arrangements, the invitations, the seating arrangements, the music. At first none of this bothered Nathalie; work was hectic, she wasn't a party organizer by nature, and she was relieved to have met a man so unconcerned with gender stereotypes that he could throw himself into wedding planning with abandon. The one thing she cared about was her dress, and she and her mother found the one whose simple straight lines and elegant drape suited her perfectly. She thought walking into the church in it — into the ceremony her husband had lovingly designed for her, for them — would feel like crossing a threshold into their life together, a border crossing to a new world. Instead, as she walked down the aisle, she felt separate and alone: the only self-contained element of the entire event.