Claire Watkins - Battleborn

Will she use a microwave to heat the child’s food?

Never.

When he was a boy, Carter says, his family had a garden where they grew fresh fruits and vegetables. He’s told Marin about this garden, many times. The garden was monstrously fecund. His mother spent days and days in their basement, canning its yields. He wants to know, Will she garden? Will she can?

Of course, she says.

Why does she say this? She doesn’t know. She is not willing to can.

Marin never cooks. For dinner, she likes to make herself cereal or cheese and crackers or half an English muffin with mayonnaise and a microwaved egg on top. This is another thing that will have to change. Carter never cooks either, but this is not something that will have to change. Carter has seven brothers and sisters and when he was a boy, he says, his mother made them all a healthy, hot meal, every single night. She never used a microwave.

When he was a boy, Carter says, his family never ate out. He and Marin are always eating out. Their refrigerator is crammed with wire-handled Chinese takeout boxes and containers of pasta with the lids pinched on and Styrofoam clamshells of crab cakes and vegetable quesadillas and leftover restaurant steaks wrapped in aluminum foil. Marin pretends to be apologetic about these—it’s just that they’re so busy, she says. But she likes eating out. She is comforted by the choreography of a restaurant. And she likes to bring the leftover steaks to bed and gnaw on them, cold, while she watches TV.

A memory Marin often excavates during their arguments:

They’d been dating only three months when Carter asked her to meet his parents. It had just rained and the two of them were walking to the BART station, trading easy jokes about the terrible, bombastic movie they’d just seen. Carter stopped on the shining, still-wet sidewalk and took her hand. Come home with me, he said. She loved the urgency of the question, and how fearlessly he asked it.

The next morning they drove from San Francisco to Seattle, then continued north to a suburb of Seattle. It was his mother’s fiftieth birthday, and their visit was a surprise. When they arrived, Carter’s mother held Marin as though she were her own baby. His mother did not have a bank account, Marin learned. His mother did not have a driver’s license. She was cooking her own birthday dinner.

In the kitchen, Marin wanted to seem helpful. She opened the door of the pantry to reveal a wall of hand-canned fruits and vegetables. The stained-glass colors of tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini and green beans. Carrot spears, halved beets, apricots, rings of apple. Small shriveled pickles and relish and a row of homogeneous dun-colored jams. Pearl onions like eyeballs.

In the pantry Marin said, I need some air. No one heard her.

She walked to the tennis courts across the street and smoked just a tiny bit of a stale joint she kept in her compact. Small white moths flitted silently in the halos of the court lights, and she watched these until she felt a little better. She returned to the house and over dinner she saw quite clearly that she was attending the birthday celebration of a fifty-year-old woman who had never had an orgasm.

On the long drive home, Marin sat silently with her anxieties, turning them over in her head. She had a tendency to be self-destructive, she knew. Before Carter, her life had been a string of beautiful, aloof men with names like the four legs of a very sturdy table. Even now she had the urge to call one of them up and see if he still knew his way around her. She could pass a whole day inflaming the listlessness inside her with erotic fantasies of men who, for the most part, had been unkind to her.

When was she going to grow up?

She looked at Carter. He smiled, bleary-eyed from the drive, and put his hand on the back of her neck. She was twenty-nine. He would be a good husband. A wonderful father. He loved her as though it had never occurred to him that he could feel otherwise. She wanted to be someone who deserved a love like that. She smiled back at him and cracked her window, feeling the stale air sucked from the rental car. She inhaled deeply, and when she exhaled she let her doubts slip out the window with her breath, littered them all along I-5.

Six months later, in April, Marin and Carter were married beneath a copse of papery crab-apple blossoms in Golden Gate Park. Carter had already found an impressive job in the progressive high desert town with the strict zoning laws. A place to raise a child. They bought their first car and hitched it to their moving truck and towed it out of California. Every hundred miles or so Marin asked Carter to pull over, and when he did she opened the door of the U-Haul and vomited on the side of the road.

They arrived in the adobe town and the questions began. Now Carter comes home from work and wants to know, what has she eaten today?

Has she exercised?

How much water has she drunk?

What is her temperature?

Did she nap?

In what position did she sleep?

I don’t want to talk about it, she sometimes says.

We have to talk about it, he says.

He’s right, she knows. They are going to have a child together. They have to talk about everything. They will always have to talk about everything.

The baby grows inside her. Carter brings home fruit and leafy greens and obscure whole grains Marin has never heard of. Before bed—when once he would have touched her—he leans down and speaks to her midsection. He insists on massaging her neck and feet, which do not bother her, and the knots running along either side of her spine, which do. Under his hands Marin cannot help but return to his mother’s pantry. Everycolor walls of foodstuff close in around her. White moths flit around the watty bulb dangling from the ceiling. How briefly her life was her own.

Then, when the child is born, something unexpected happens. Carter’s questions cease. Now the child has been here for eleven weeks and it is as though his points are moot. Or if not moot, then at least he does not raise them. She can tell he would like to—she can see their shadows traveling occasionally across his face—but he does not. Perhaps he finally loves her for who she is. Perhaps he sees that she is trying. Perhaps he is as tired as she is.

The weeks since the child was born have been exhausting but rewarding, too. The child lifts its head. He smiles. He sleeps on his father’s chest. Marin takes photos. The child will want to see this someday.

This weekend they are taking their first trip as a family, meeting up with married friends from the city to go camping at Lake Tahoe. On the plane the baby sleeps and Carter sleeps and in this peace Marin thinks for the first time how good it will feel to see these old friends from when they were young. She opens the in-flight magazine and there in the center spread are photos of the lake and captions which compare its waters to precious gems. Emerald. Sapphire. Aquamarine. She can see them there on the white ring of shore. Val. Jake. Old friends from before the child. How she’s looked forward to sitting beside them on the shore of the largest alpine lake in North America.

They meet their friends at the campsite. Val and Jake have children of their own. They also have a dog. The children are four and six. The dog is a reddish color, a copper retriever. The group goes down to the water: Carter and Marin, Val and Jake, the children, the infant and the dog.

The beach is rockier than Marin would have liked, but the water is clearer than she could have imagined. Val and Carter swim with the children. Carter makes a spirited effort to teach the boy the front crawl—It starts with a glide, he says. The glide is everything—but the boy loses interest. Marin sits with the baby on a blanket under an umbrella. The baby wears a hat.