Christopher Hacker - The Morels

She came home to their brand-new empty apartment in Queens fully invested in her brand-new life. She indulged her role as wife, unpacking the registry gifts that were waiting for them, setting them away in the cupboards, in the sideboard, in the closet. It was a fairy tale, and she indulged it. She was never one to play house or dream about weddings. Her childhood was spent in tomboy competition with older boys, proclaiming her disdain for all things girlie. Girlishness, when it came in her late teens, was about dress up — black lace and black eyeliner, an ironic subscription to Cosmo —but now she saw what she’d been missing out on. Playing house was fun! She enlisted her mother’s help, which her mother was thrilled to offer.

And in this way, maternity was a kind of surrender, too. A giving in. She relinquished her body to this being inside her and found the rest of her following suit. This was uncharted territory. She was vulnerable and in need of help. Wasn’t there something thrilling in this life she suddenly found herself in? Something oddly transgressive? In the kitchen, pregnant, barefoot? So this was the thrill her mother got out of her winning jello molds and Tupperware parties. And finally her surrender to Arthur. She tried out different cocktails on him: sidecars and martinis and sours — when he came home after a full day at work — and sipped her virgin versions of them, gauging his reaction. She cooked for him and was thrilled when he asked for seconds, hurt when he didn’t. She washed his socks and his boxers and his T-shirts and his sweats and folded everything neatly into the dresser drawers for him to discover and marvel at, gratefully. She was grateful for his gratitude. This was the idyll of newlyweds Arthur and Penelope.

Her brother Ryan was appalled. You’re so young, what are you doing?

I’m happy, she said.

But what happened to your brain? You’re a poster child for the pitfalls of marriage! In one fell swoop you’ve managed to get yourself pregnant and enslaved. What happened to apprenticing in Provence? What happened to owning a restaurant?

I can still do those things, she said.

How? You’re grooming yourself to be somebody’s maid.

What about Martha, Penelope said.

Martha’s different. She has the ankles for it, the double chin. From my baby sister, I expected something different.

But Penelope was proud to be engaged in this fertile life of hers, this fertile marriage. Her brief status as biological celebrity. There were maternity clothes that attempted to deemphasize the belly — dark colors, loosely fit — she didn’t understand this. Why would anybody want to hide the only clear evidence of her biological worth — her fifteen minutes of fame? She walked down the grocery store aisle grandly, like royalty. She bared herself, weather permitting, in spandex scoop-necked tops, pulled up so that the crown of her belly was showing, belly button like the tip of a thumb.

Neither, though, was she one of those hippie freaks who went on about how “beautiful” this all was, about “body wisdom,” who hennaed their tummies and braided their hair and performed their deliveries in rivers while chanting in time to a drumming circle. Nor was she like those yuppie freaks who invited their girlfriends to make papier-mâché pregnancy casts over sparkling grape juice and Manchego. She had no illusions about the ordeal of pregnancy. The morning sickness was brutal. She had to breathe delicately through her mouth because any smell, savory or otherwise, would have her groping for the bucket, and not just in the morning, it turned out — it was constant, unrelenting — it was a twenty-eight-week hangover, a boat cruise in bad weather. She lost her balance, her composure, her sense of dignity, and when it finally went away in the beginning of her third trimester, she was left with this thing inside her, floating, ravenous, feeding on her from the inside out — it had gills, apparently, and fed on her blood — it was an alien implant, sucking the life out of her, bleeding her dry, growing stranger every day, and it would eventually emerge triumphant, tearing its way through and leaving her a shell, a lifeless shell of spent meat. The sonogram reinforced this image — it looked like an ancient fossil, some extinct creature from a time when the world was more dangerous, or a satellite photograph of life on one of Jupiter’s moons. The technician handed it to them and, sure, she and Arthur stammered over it, cried over it, and, yes, in part that blubbering was because they were stunned by this ancient biological miracle that had visited its everyday magic upon them, but it was also the blubbering of the sole survivors in a horror movie being chased by the monster. She tacked it on the fridge. My God, what was this thing they were about to unleash?

And then came her Will. Her reason for breathing. New parenthood was an ordeal but a different kind of ordeal. Will was on their side. They were in it together. It was them and Will against the world. They battled their health insurers for coverage for the emergency room visits they were forced to make — Will was prone to febrile seizures. She battled her family’s stubborn refusal to wash their hands before touching Will. Her mother: Do you think your grandparents washed their hands every time they handled you kids? They battled pedestrians and restaurant-goers who’d give them dirty looks every time Will so much as gurgled from his stroller — as though he were a boom box they’d brought in, as though they were the selfish ones! Arthur battled his employers — for paternity leave, for more vacation time, for more sick days, for more compassion for the new father whose wife had all she could do to keep from going crazy in the house alone with a baby who wouldn’t stop crying because he, well, who the hell knows why he won’t stop crying! They called the pediatrician, whom they liked, whom they trusted, but who frankly was of no goddamned use. New parenthood was a fire alarm that wouldn’t stop, that followed them around wherever they went, even into their sleep — Penelope would wake at three in the morning in a sweat and rush to Will’s crib to find him fine, he was fine, happily asleep. It was one unfixable thing after the next — it was everybody wanting a piece of them, but they barely had enough for each other — and when Will was crying, when he wouldn’t sleep or take the nipple or jump through the hoop in the next stage of development like the book said, it was a total nightmare they couldn’t wake from, but when he smiled or the moment he finally said, “Da,” when he slept through the night or finally got up onto his wobbly fat little legs and took those five, six, seven steps before toppling over, it was a dream they never wanted to end. How could this be? This miracle, how was it she could be so lucky?

And when she felt this way, she guarded the feeling; she didn’t tell her family or Arthur even. It was hubris to feel this way. If anybody else knew, the word might spread, and then anybody could just come and take it away from her. So she told her mother that she was struggling, that it was hard, which was true enough, but she didn’t tell her mother how her heart ached for Will when he was in another room or in another person’s arms. Her mother thought she was doing Penelope a favor when she drove up from Virginia to babysit, insisting that she and Arthur go out, have fun, treat themselves to a hotel, but really all they did was sulk over their candlelit dinners, fidget through the movie distracted, until neither of them could take it anymore and canceled the room reservation and took Will back, relieved to be home, to be a family again.

It was hard, though. Arthur was right. It was life altering, mind altering, they were no longer the same people they once were, not older exactly but different. To be a mother wasn’t merely to have a child; it was to have weathered a fundamental change of chemistry, of identity. She looked back on the years before their marriage, before Will, and thought, Who was that girl ? Not meanly. Like a compassionate big sister. She finally understood that contradiction in her parents — was able to reconcile those disjointed impressions she had of them — the hip teenagers they claimed to have been with the prudish fuddy-duddies she knew them to be now. It made perfect sense. She’d read somewhere once that humans shed their old cells every seven years — or maybe it was that humans renewed their cells at a rate of every seven years — so that after seven years one was literally no longer the same person. If that was true, then why couldn’t both versions of her parents coexist? And she, Penelope — why couldn’t it be that she had been both of these people? That she had evolved?