A. Homes - Things You Should Know

Soon they will go back to school and the summer romance will end. They will leave and she will stay on.

The day the stick turns positive, she makes her rounds.

Travis has a new girlfriend, a blonde who works at the snack bar. She finds them on the other side of town by the marina. They make out for more than forty minutes before Travis leads her to a platform at the end of the dock. When they are done, they dive into the water for a quick swim and she finds herself checking her watch, worrying that the sperm is getting cold. When they leave she has trouble locating the condom, finally finding it, dangling from a nail on one of the pilings almost as though he knew and left it for her. Five cc — a very good shot.

She inseminates herself, lying back in the car, knees hooked over the steering wheel, blanket over her for warmth. It is cooler in the evenings now; she has a layer of long underwear on under her sex outfit, and a spare blanket in the car. The boys and girls all wear sweatshirts declaring their intentions, preferences, fantasies: Dartmouth, Tufts, SUNY, Princeton, Hobart, Columbia, NYU.

She lies back, looking up at the sky; there is a full moon, a thousand stars, Orion, Taurus, the Big Dipper. She lies waiting and then moves on. The wind is starting to blow. At the end of every summer there is always a storm, a violent closing out of the season, it charges through literally changing the air — the day it passes, fall begins.

Her favorite couple is hidden in a curve of dune. They are already at it when she arrives. Leaving the night-vision glasses in the car, she travels by moonlight with just her fanny pack. The wind is hurling sand across the dune; the surf crashes unrelentingly. They do it fast, now practiced, they do it seriously, knowing this will be one of the last times, they do it and then they run for cover.

The condom is still warm when she finds it. She holds it between her teeth and, using both hands, scoops the sand, molding it into a mound that will hold her hips up high. She inseminates herself lying in the spot where they had lain. She inseminates, listening to the pounding of the waves, the sea ahead of the storm, watching moonlight shimmering across the water.

A phosphorescent dream: she thinks she feels it, she thinks she knows the exact moment it happens; the sperm and the egg finding each other, penetrating, exploding, dividing, floating, implanting, multiplying. She imagines a sea horse, a small, curled thing, primitive, growing, buds of hands — fists clenched, a translucent head, eyes bulging. She feels it digging in, feeding, becoming human. She wakes up hungry, ready. In May she will meet her, a little girl, just in time for summer — Georgica.

It is about wanting and need, wanting and need — a peculiar, desperate kind of need, needing to get what you never got, wanting it still, wanting it all the more, nonetheless. It is about a profound desire for connection. It is about how much we don’t know, how much we can’t say, what we don’t understand. It is about how unfamiliar even the familiar can become.

It is about holding one’s breath, holding the breath until you are blue in the face, holding the breath to threaten, to dare, to say if you do not give me what I want, I will stop breathing. It is about holding back, withholding. It is about being stuck. It is about panic. It is about realizing you are in over your head, something’s got to give. It is about things falling apart. It is about fracture.

It is afternoon, just after lunch. She starts dialing. She dials, knowing no one is home. Her mother, retired, remains a worker, always out, doing, running. Her father is busy as well, taking classes, volunteering. She dials as a kind of nervous tic and then, when she can’t get the call to go through, she dials more frantically as though in a nightmare; calling for help, screaming and no one hears, picking up to find the line is dead. She dials, forgetting the new area code.

“The area code for the number you’re calling has changed. The new area code is 343. Please redial the number using the new area code.”

She dials again, unsure of the last four digits of her calling card.

“The personal identification number you entered is incorrect. Please reenter the last four digits of your calling card.”

She reenters.

“I’m sorry.”

She is cut off.

She dials once more — if it doesn’t work, she is going to dial 0 and have an operator place the call, she is going to dial 911 and tell them it is an emergency, somebody must do something. She dials 9 for an outside line and then she dials the number straight through, letting the office pay for the call — fuck it. The new area code feels odd on her fingers. She hates change, she absolutely hates change.

And then the phone is ringing, and on the second ring the answering machine picks up, and there is her mother’s voice, distant, formal — the outgoing announcement of a generation that has never gotten used to the answering machine.

She hangs up without leaving a message.

She checks her schedule. There is a three o’clock meeting — the subject: pain relief.

She has not spoken to Steve today. That part of their relationship, calls during the day, is over. There used to be phone calls as soon as he walked out of the apartment, sometimes from the elevator going down, “I’m in the elevator, the neighbors are surrounding me, pick up the phone.” A call when he got to the office, “Just checking in,” after lunch, “I shouldn’t have had the wine,” in the late afternoon, “I’ll be finished early,” and then again before leaving, “What do you want to do about dinner?”

Now, they can’t talk. Every conversation, every attempt turns into a fight. She can’t say the right thing, he can’t do the right thing, they hate each other — all the more for the disappointment. There is no negotiation, no interest in repair, only anger and inertia.

“It’s not my fault,” he says.

“If there’s such a thing as fault — it’s half your fault.”

She hurries to prepare for the meeting, the launch of a combination acetaminophen/homeopathic preparation (Tylenol and Rescue Remedy) — Products for Modern Living, a pill for all your problems.

Wendy, the shared assistant, stops her as she’s going down the hall. “I couldn’t get you a conference room for a whole hour, so I got you two halves.”

“Two halves of a conference room?”

“From three to three-thirty you’re in two, and from three-thirty until four you’re in six.”

“Halfway through, we have to change rooms? That’s crazy.”

Wendy shrugs.

“It’s not just about any headache,” she says, sitting down with the client. “It’s your headache. It’s the sense that you’re about to explode. Your head is pounding, the boss is droning on in the background, kids are screaming, you need relief and you need it fast.”

The client nods.

“It’s the classic headache ad — pumped up, there’s throbbing and there’s volume and pressure.”

“Modern life is very stressful,” the client says, happily counting the bucks.

“There’s the emergency room doctor/trauma surgeon, the voice of authority. ‘As a doctor at a leading trauma hospital, I know about pain, I know about stress, and I know how quickly I need to feel better.’ The doctor moves through the emergency room — all kinds of horrible things are happening in the background. ‘A combination of acetaminophen and a homeopathic supplement, Products for Modern Living offers safe, effective relief.’ She picks up a patient’s chart and makes a note. ‘Sometimes what’s old is what’s new.’”

“I like it. It’s fresh and familiar,” the client says.

“Let’s move from here into conference room six and we’ll review the rest of our campaign,” she says, seamlessly moving her team down the hall.