A. Homes - Things You Should Know

She goes back to the car, assumes the position, and, making an effort to be discreet, inseminates. She stays in position for half an hour and then continues her rounds.

The romance of the hunt. She walks up and down looking for her men. The beaches are crowded with bonfires, picnics, catered parties. The air is filled with the scent of starter fluid, meat cooking; barbecue embers pulse, radiant red like molten lava.

She puts on the night-vision glasses, the world glows the green of things otherworldly and outside of nature. Everything is dramatic, everything is inverted, every gesture is evidence, every motion has meaning. She is seeing in the dark, seeing what can’t be seen. A cigarette sails through the night like a tracer. She has to maximize, it’s not enough to try just once, she wants to fill herself, she wants many, multiple, may the best man win. She wants competition, she wants there to be a race, a blend, she wants it to mix and match.

It is still early — the girl doesn’t get off until ten or possibly eleven. She lies back in the sand, rubbing the points on her head where the screws were, dreaming. She glances up at the bathhouse. On the roof is a weather vane — a whale, a mounted Moby spinning north, south, east, west, to tell which way the wind blows, its outline sharp against the sky. She dreams of old whalers, fishermen, dreams she is in a boat, far from shore, in the middle of the open sea. She thinks of her grandmother, freeing her. She thinks of how proud her grandmother would be that she’s taken things in hand.

Finally they arrive. Creatures of habit, they go back to the same spot where they were yesterday, this time moving with greater urgency. There is something genuine, heartfelt in the sex habits of the young — it is all new, thrilling, scary, a mutual adventure.

She retrieves and extracts her second sample. In the car, with her hips up high, she inseminates and she waits.

She imagines all of it mingling in her like sea foam. She imagines that with the sperm and the sand, she will make a baby born with pearl earrings in her ears.

In the local paper there is a notice for a childbirthing class. She goes, thinking she should be ready, she should know more. There are only two couples; a boy and girl still in high school and a local couple in their mid-thirties — the husband and wife both look pregnant, both sip enormous sodas throughout the class.

“When are you due?” the instructor asks each of them.

“In three weeks,” the girl says, rubbing her belly, polishing the baby to perfection. “We didn’t plan for the pregnancy, so we thought we better plan for the birth.”

“Four weeks,” the other woman says, sucking on her straw.

“And you?”

“I’m working on it,” she says. And no one asks more.

On the table is an infant doll, a knitted uterus, and a bony pelvis.

“Your baby wants you,” the childbirth teacher says, picking up the doll and passing it around.

The doll ends up with her. She holds it, thinking it would be rude to put it back down on the table — she might seem like a bad mother. She holds it, patting the plastic diaper of the plastic infant, pretending to comfort it. She sits the doll on her lap and continues taking notes: gestational age, baby at three weeks, three months, six months, nine months, dilation of the cervix, the stages of labor.

“All pregnancies end in birth,” the instructor says, holding up the knitted uterus.

Leaving the hospital, she runs into the cop coming out of the emergency room.

“You all right?” she asks.

“Stepped on a rusty nail and had to get a tetanus shot.” He rubs his arm. “So, how about that coffee?”

“Absolutely, before the end of summer,” she says, getting into her car.

She is a woman waiting for her life to begin. She waits, counting the days. Her breasts are sore, full, like when they were first budding. She waits, thinking something is happening, and then it is not. There is a stain in her underwear, faint, light, like smoke, and overnight she begins to bleed. She bleeds thick, old blood, like rust. She bleeds bright red blood, like a gunshot wound. She bleeds heavily. She feels herself, hollow, fallow, failed. And bleeding, she mourns all that has not happened, all that will never happen. She mourns the boys, the men, the fiancé, her grandmother, the failings of her family, and her own peculiar shortcomings that have put her in this position.

She becomes all the more determined to try again. She counts the days, keeps her temperature charts and watches her men.

She will try harder, making sure that on the two most viable days she gets at least two doses — no such thing as too much. She continues to prepare. August, high tide, peak of the season. The local newspapers are thick with record numbers of deer jumping in front of cars, a drowning on an unprotected beach, shark spottings. The back pages are filled with pictures of social events: the annual hospital gala, the museum gala, the celebrity tennis match, benefit polo, golf tournaments, the horse show. This summer’s scandal involves a man who tried to get into “the” country club, was loudly rejected, and then showed up at the front door every day waiting for someone to sign him in as their guest.

She makes a coffee date with the cop. At the last minute he calls to cancel.

“They’ve got me on overtime. Can I get a rain check?”

“Yes,” she says, “but it’s not raining.”

She goes on with her rounds, her anthropological education. She gets bolder. Out of curiosity she goes to the other beach, the one she has always heard about, notorious for late-night activity.

There are men in the dunes, men who tell their wives that they’re running out for milk, or a pack of cigarettes, and find themselves prowling, looking for relief. With her night-vision glasses she can see it all quite clearly; rough, animalistic, horrifying and erotic — pure pornography.

A Planned Parenthood vigilante, throughout her cycle, she continues distributing the condom supply. She wants to keep them in the habit; she wants them to practice safe sex. She tracks her boys; she has to keep up, to know their rhythms and routines. She has to know where to find them when the moment is right. She adds a new one to her list, a sleeper who’s come into his own over the course of the summer — Travis. An exceptional swimmer, it is Travis who goes into the undertow like a fish. He puts his fins on, walks backward into the water and takes off.

Every morning he is in the water, swimming miles of laps back and forth, up and down — the ocean is his Olympic sized pool. Sometimes she swims with him. She puts herself in the water where he is; she feels her body gliding near his. She swims a quarter mile, a half mile, moving with the current. She feels the sting of the salt in her eyes, strings of seaweed like fringe hanging off her ankles, the tug of the riptide. She swims not thinking she could be carried out to sea but that she is a mermaid and this is her habitat. She swims to the next lifeguard stand, gets out, and walks back, having perfected walking on sand, keeping her feet light, barely making a mark.

It is nearly the end of summer. She has been taking her temperature, peeing on sticks, waiting for the surge that tells her she’s ripe, ready.

Late afternoon at Main Beach, her boys assemble to be photographed for the town Christmas card. They pile onto the stand, wearing red Santa hats, sucking in their stomachs, flexing their muscles. On cue they smile. She stands behind the official photographer and, with her own camera, clicks.

Does it matter to her which of them is the father of her child, whose sperm succeeds? She likes the unknowing, the possibility that it could be any one of a number of them, and then sometimes she thinks she wants it to be him, the boy with the hieroglyph, with the baby-sitter/waitress girlfriend — he strikes her as the most stable, most sincere.