Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“Aaaahhh!” the crowd said, and laughed. Marina, breathless, looked over the edge where the water from the roof churned into a pit of mud and vines like it was pouring off Niagara Falls. She dipped an arm beneath the child’s midsection and carried him back to the center of the room again. The baby was laughing too. What was the joke, exactly? That she really thought he was going to go over the same way she had thought that Easter would not break the surface of the water again? That this was how they ensured an intelligent race, by letting the careless babies fall like ripe fruit from the trees? She held the child beneath his arms to face her. He was no doubt thinner than the average American model but very healthy, kicking and gurgling with pleasure. The toddler stopped her running for a minute to pick up the unemployed knife and began to knock it against the floor behind the older woman. The baby then urinated on Marina, a long exuberant stream against the front of her already soaking shirt. The men laughed harder now and the women laughed more sedately, shaking their heads at all the silly foreigners in the world who don’t know enough to hold a baby in the right direction. The toddler’s knife got stuck in the floorboards and after a momentary wail she pulled it out and plunged it back again, missing the old woman’s back by six inches. “Could you pick up that knife?” Marina said to Dr. Nkomo.

Dr. Swenson would no doubt have argued for respecting the natural order in which babies sailed off the edge of a flat earth and toddlers played with the knives they would one day need to understand in order to feed themselves. These children had escaped without major injury before Marina arrived and chances were no doubt good that they would continue to exist after the company departed, but still, Dr. Nkomo was willing to pry the knife from the unwilling hands of the little girl, and when he had handed it to one of the men she put her face down on the floor and wept. The woman weaving shingles stood up and said something to Dr. Nkomo, pointing at Marina, pointing at him. The teenage girl came and took the baby away.

“Have I done something already?” Marina asked.

“It is something about your clothes,” he said. “Clothes is the only word I recognized, and maybe I am not sure of that.”

The older woman now got up stiffly from the floor and began to unbutton Marina’s shirt. Marina caught the woman’s fingers and shook her head but the woman simply waited until Marina let her hands go and then she started again. Her touch was both patient and persistent. It made no difference to Marina that there was urine on her filthy, soaking clothes but there was no way to explain that. When Marina stepped away the woman followed her. She was considerably shorter than Marina, they all were, and so Marina was left to look at the part in her gray hair, the long braid that went down her back. Her dress pulled against her belly and her belly pressed against Marina’s groin. The woman’s belly was high and hard and suddenly Marina saw the woman’s arms were thin, her face and legs were thin. Only her stomach protruded. Marina considered this as she stepped away from her again and again until it seemed possible that they might both go over the edge. Marina stopped, considering the ways to extricate herself while the woman resumed the work with the buttons, her stomach pressed against her, and then she felt the baby kick.

“My God,” Marina said.

“I think she wants to wash your shirt,” Dr. Nkomo said, seeming deeply embarrassed. “Once they are on to an idea it is very difficult to dissuade them.”

“She’s pregnant. I felt the baby kick,” Marina said. “It kicked me.”

The baby kicked again as if grateful for the recognition and the woman lifted her face and shook her head at Marina as if to say, Kids, what can you do? Her forehead was deeply creased and her neck was wattled. There was a dark, flat mole of an irregular shape on the side of her nose near the eye that could have been a melanoma. Buttons undone, she helped Marina out of her shirt and Marina let her take it. What was it that Anders had said? Lost Horizon for ovaries? How many children had this woman undressed and how many of the people in this tree house were her children? The toddler weeping for her knife? The woman weaving the roof? The men waiting to get back to carving their boat? The other woman came with a rag that was small and not particularly clean and rubbed down Marina’s arms and back, rubbed her stomach and neck. She touched Marina’s bra and said something to the older woman who leaned her nose between Marina’s breasts to inspect the lace edge of the white cups more closely. Dr. Nkomo busied himself with the toddler, his back decisively pointed in her direction, but the other two men folded their arms across their chests, watching the show with interest, and Marina was not bothered by any of this. She had been kicked by a fetus whose mother was at the very least sixty and could easily have been more than seventy. The teenage girl stood in front of Marina and held up her arms until Marina understood that this was an instruction and not a game. She held up her arms as well. It was the girl’s clear intention to drop a shift dress over Marina’s head but the height discrepancy between them did not allow for it and so Marina pulled it on herself. No sooner was it covering her head and somewhat twisted than one of them pulled down her pants and began to rub her legs with the cloth as well. She stepped up obediently, one foot and then the other, and the pants were taken away. Marina stood there like the others now in her loose trapeze dress full enough to take her through an entire pregnancy because among the female Lakashi all clothes were maternity clothes. Without zippers or buttons, Marina saw the way in which they looked like candidates for a rustic insane asylum. The outfit was considerably shorter on her and the women poked at her knees and laughed as if there was something vaguely scandalous about knees. The women sat down on the floor and Marina sat with them and put her hands back on the woman’s stomach, waiting for the baby to move again while the one who made shingles pulled back Marina’s hair with a carved comb and braided it more tightly than her own mother had ever managed to braid it when she was a child. The teenage girl bit off a single piece of the palm frond with her teeth and tied off the end of her braid while the baby swam beneath Marina’s hands. She would say six months along. Marina realized then she had not touched a single pregnant woman since it stopped being her business to touch them. How could that be possible? After all the countless bellies she had run her hands over in her training, how had she let them all go?

“You knew, didn’t you, about the Lakashi, about why Dr. Swenson is here? Anders told you?” Dr. Nkomo asked, the little girl in his lap, playing with his glasses. She was gentle as she folded the arms in and out.

“I’d been told, but I can’t say I necessarily believed it. It’s something altogether different to see things for myself.”

“It’s true,” Dr. Nkomo said nodding. “I had read Dr. Swenson’s papers but I was still very surprised. I have thought too much about the fertility and reproduction of mosquitoes and not enough about the fertility and reproduction of women. That’s what my wife would say. She says if we wait much longer for a baby she will have to come and live among the Lakashi in order to get pregnant.”

Marina reached back and moved the base of her braid back and forth, trying to loosen it up before it gave her a headache. “I thought your research was in fertility with Dr. Swenson.”

“Ah,” Dr. Nkomo said, taking his glasses back from the little girl and in doing so breaking her heart all over again. “We work together. We are colleagues, but we do not share the same field of study. Our fields overlap.”