Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said between sobs. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to date lots of boys. I wanted to graduate and marry somebody successful and live in a big two-story house and have lots of children but not like this, and not in a shitty old attic that’s hot as an oven, and not even graduate from high school. And poor.” She punctuated her sentences with little bops of her fist against my other shoulder.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” she said, as if accusing.

“I do love you, though,” I said.

She drew in a big slow breath and let it out, still leaning against me.

“Oh, God,” she said. Then, “God, please forgive me.”

I said, “God doesn’t mind people having babies.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said, crying again.

“I mean it,” I said.

“Just stop.”

I shuffled us around for a minute, while she settled down.

“Well, wait and see,” I said. “I’m going to work hard, and build us a beautiful house — it’ll be like a mansion, to us anyway — and we’ll have beautiful children, starting with this one, and they’ll be so beautiful that people will hardly even recognize them as ordinary human beings, like a whole new amazingly beautiful and intelligent subspecies or something. Coltranians. Like you. And we’ll have dogs, and horses. A couple of fat, arrogant cats. And I’ll drive a cool Ford pickup, a good, solid, settled-down man, and you’ll have something like a Mercedes station wagon to haul around all the kids in style. And we’ll have a boat, if you want, and take it to the reservoir, and ski, and maybe even build a cabin beside my grandmother’s little lake up in the country, looking out over the water.”

Olivia gave a quietly derisive snort when I was done, but I could tell she was lightening up.

I said, “We’ve got all the time in the world. Look how young we are. Look how much time we have to try to get all the things we want.” I stepped back so I could look at her.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said.

She nodded, looked at me for a moment, then looked down again.

“Okay,” she said. The tears were there again, but quiet ones. They were tears of sadness, I thought, instead of fear. That was better, I hoped.

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER my older brother showed up, with his fiancée.

They came into the little living room, and I turned on the bare, bright bulb again, and after some sympathetic and concerned small talk from them, questions about how this came about and what our plans might be, they got down to business.

Olivia and I knew that his fiancée, Ruth, had been whisked to New York the previous year by her parents for an abortion. We knew what was coming. As soon as they even hinted at the idea that we should consider doing the same, Olivia leapt up and stomped to the bathroom and slammed the door. Immediately, the house began to shudder from the force of the chugging fan in there trying to pull wind through the little space under the door, which made a weird kind of howling sound.

Curtis and Ruth seemed astonished, looking from the hallway where Olivia’d disappeared, back to me, back to the hallway. Almost instantly after Olivia shut the bathroom door, cutting off the fan breeze, our sweating increased, beads popping out on our foreheads and running down our faces. It tickled me trickling from my armpits down over my ribs.

I went into the tiny hallway and knocked on the bathroom door, having to shout to be heard over the noise of the fan and the wind howling through the little space below the door.

“Olivia, would you just come out, please?”

“Tell them to go away!”

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to do that.”

“I’m not listening!”

I made my apologies to Curtis and Ruth and, after a moment, realizing that Olivia was not coming out of the bathroom until they left, and maybe worrying that the fan’s desperate huffing might destabilize the old frame house itself, they got up to go. When Ruth had stepped out onto the deck, Curtis came back to me.

“Just think about it, okay?” he said.

“Curtis, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Were you here just now? Did I imagine that you and Ruth were just in there talking to me while Olivia shut herself in the bathroom and lost her mind?”

He frowned, gave me a hug, and they left.

“Are they gone?” Olivia shouted from the bathroom.

“Yes!” I shouted back.

She opened the door and stalked back to the bedroom and fell onto her side into the bed. The house stopped shaking and the hot air in the apartment began to move again. When I followed her into the bedroom she looked up at me, her face puffy and streaked with tears.

“I’m not going to do that, I’m not ,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I know. We’re not.”

“I couldn’t do that,” she declared.

“Me, neither,” I said. “And it’s way too late for that, anyway. They didn’t realize. Don’t worry.”

There was a knock on the door.

“ Tell them to go away ,” Olivia said, and burrowed herself beneath the bedsheet, clamping a pillow over her head.

It was the landlady from downstairs, standing in the weak yellow glow of the deck light, her scrawny arms crossed, a scowl on her face.

“If every night is going to be some kind of commotion like this,” she said, “I am not going to stand for it. You can take your kind of behavior to some other place.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I promise we’re not usually like that.”

“Or loud other kind of behavior, either,” she said, narrowing her eyes and arching her thinning brows.

I nodded, mumbled, “Okay, right.” Then she stomped down the deck stairs.

“Was it them?” Olivia said, her voice muffled beneath the pillow.

“Just Curtis,” I said. “Forgot his keys.”

Olivia stayed beneath the pillow. I watched her side move up and down with breathing for a moment, until it began shaking with sobs, and I went into the darkened kitchen and sat there alone for a while, sweating in the warm breeze the fan pulled through the kitchen window. I smoked a cigarette. I’d been there a good hour, knowing Olivia had cried herself to sleep, when an old Chevy Bel Air station wagon idled up to the stop sign on the quiet street below. I couldn’t see who was in it but I recognized it from the student parking lot at school. I knew the boy who drove it. I heard loud stage-whispers, and made out some girl’s voice saying, Is that it? Is that where they’re living? And other loud whispers, unintelligible. And then the wagon rattled off down the street.

This is about as strange as it gets, I said to myself.

But for the sound of the fan huffing away, then, the apartment was quiet. It was quiet on the little streets in our new neighborhood, down below. The streetlamps stood silently above their diaphanous pools of yellow-gray light. The neighbors’ houses were quiet, sleeping. The inmates at the asylum down the street were quiet, sleeping or lying awake, wondering how this had happened to them, or who they were, or where. Our parents were home, in their beds or sitting at kitchen tables, drinking coffee, sleepless.

I opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. The fridge was a small old Frigidaire, with the locking handle. It cast its chilly bright block of light onto me and into the tiny kitchen, which still smelled strongly of fresh paint and Formula 409 and Comet from all our cleaning. The cold air rolled into the hot room in a little cloud of condensation and rolled away toward the huffing fan. I closed the fridge, sat at the table in the dark, and drank the beer. It was so cold, and bitter, and delicious. I was bathed in sweat. I drank the beer down in big long gulps, then sat there blinking my eyes from the cold, the carbonation, the alcoholic buzz.