The Parallel Apartments (49 page)

“I have to go job hunting. My credit card is full.”

“No, you don't. You're expecting.”

“They make women work until the last possible moment,” said Justine. “Until you can practically
see
the baby.”

A knock at the door. Thank god. Anything to interrupt this unnerving talk of pregnancy and birth and doctors. Justine got up and answered it.

A young woman, early twenties. Ah, their two-doors-down neighbor. The mezzo-soprano. She was holding a plastic bowl of Tootsie Pops and suckers and other Halloween leftovers.

“Hi,” said Justine.

“Hi yourself,” said the woman, offering up her bowl of candy. “I'd like to officially welcome you to the Parallel even though I know you've been here a little while already, haha, sorry, I was busy looking for tricksters.”

There was something proprietary about the way the woman held the bowl, as if she were waiting for Justine to contribute rather than take a sucker. Justine picked one anyway.

“Thank you.”

“Hi,” said Rose, from her prostration on the apartment's gross carpeting.

“Hi. We're a family here at the Parallel, a big, wonderful family, and I'm so happy to have a new family member. Or,” she said as she bent down to look closely at Justine's round, Frank Frazetta T-shirt-covered belly, “is it two?”

“It's
three,
” said Rose. “Jan 14.”

“How wonderful,” said the woman. “I lost mine, almost five months along. They were just playing tricks on me. I didn't get back in the tub, though.”

She put her sucker bowl down, put one hand on her own flat belly, and the other on Justine's. Justine jumped back.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, blushing and covering her mouth with both hands. “Just excited.”

“Okay,” said Justine, embarrassed that she'd jumped. “I'm really sorry to hear about your—”

“I just can't believe this,” said the woman, looking over her shoulder. “The board never said anything about this.”

“Board?”

The woman's disposition turned in an instant from a cool autumn afternoon to a predawn summer storm. She said:

“This is a trick.”

Her eyes began to wander; she seemed to be watching the movements of something inside the apartment that was visible only to her. Then she focused on Justine's belly.

“What?”

“Isn't it. Careful, I'll know if you're lying.”

Justine opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing. She looked at Rose, who shrugged with her eyes. Justine covered her belly with both arms.

“Uh, I'm not lying about anything,” she said.

The woman looked Justine up and down. She seemed satisfied by Justine's response.

“Okay, maybe it's for real,” she said finally. “I'll check on our little'un again soon. Now I have scales.”

She smiled. It was a weird smile, shaped like a punctuation brace turned sideways, the point up. It was distinctly forced, imperfectly hiding something; the smile of one pausing in the middle of a much grander emotion to deal with a trifling of some sort.

“Okay,” said Rose. “Thank you for stopping by.”

“Not too far away, is it?” the woman said, looking at Justine's belly again. “I'm so excited. I just love these messages!”

She left, taking her unsettling mouth, her bowl of junk, and her babel with her.

“What the fuck was that?” said Rose.

“What're scales?”

“I don't know. I hope you didn't just catch them.”

“A little loony.”

“What was that shit about tricks?” said Rose.

“And calling me a liar?”

“Weird.”

“Yeah,” said Rose, getting up on all fours and starting to stalk Justine like a lion after an ibex. “You'll never trick me. Haha. Raor.”

“I don't…,” said Justine, jumping up on the naked bed.

“Rumbling purring sound like jungle cats make.”

“…think…”

“Nothing hides from Jungle Cat.”

“…want it.”

Rose stopped mid-slink. “What?”

“I don't want this. Baby.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I couldn't be a good mother. I come from bad mothers. I wasn't good. My Valeria died.”

Justine expected to begin crying immediately, but nothing happened.

“You're a wonderful mother. You'll be a beautiful, sweet, hip mother.”

“No, my baby will be a tiny little blue wreck and die young and in agony, I know it.”

“Oh, Justine,” said Rose, crawling up onto the bed next to her. “If you really believed that, why didn't you get an abortion?”

“I don't know. I couldn't decide. And now…”

The ducts were filling, finally.

“What?”

“…it's even harder to decide because I'm worried you'll leave me if I don't have it.”

Justine expected—hoped—that Rose would pshaw the notion. But she did not.

The neighbor began to sing. Her powerful voice, modulated with long pauses as if in a phone conversation, seemed to come from the walls, as if she were trapped behind the drywall with a microphone. Opera. A genre that Justine simply did not get at all. It made her feel dim and left out. All that yodeling and showing off. The timbre of the granite German lyrics was nearly as depressing as the conversation they had interrupted.

“But,” shouted Justine, “if I do have it and it survives it'll grow to hate me and then you'll start to hate me because I'll hate
it.
”

Still Rose didn't counter.

“So that's why I can't decide. It feels like I have to choose whether I lose you now, or later.”

Justine felt as if she were choking.

“Rose, say something. Tell me I'm wrong.”

Still Rose was silent.

“Rose. Help me. I love you.”

The singer sang a single note, an endless G major. The tone, which reminded Justine of emergency rooms for some reason, seemed to force its way into the apartment through the drains and air-conditioner vents.

“Rose, god, please say something.”

Rose got off the bed and put her hands on her hips.

“Before we do anything else,” she shouted, “let's go see the doctor!”

The neighbor snapped off sharply, as if hit in the mouth by a closed fist, mid-warble.

Three days later, Dr. Nomb, Rose's friend, champion, and GP since the age of six, confirmed the health of the baby, although it (Justine bitterly refused to learn its sex), appeared a bit small and possibly undernourished, and so advised Justine to lay off Dr Pepper and Doritos, and to add fish-oil gelcaps, prenatal folic acid, and DHA to her diet.

“And of course no drinking, smoking, or drugging,” said Dr. Nomb, with a tone that suggested Justine might regularly commit all three prenatal crimes. “This is to include caffeine. Hear me?”

Justine nodded. Rose radiated nearly pure happiness, its small impurity being disbelief. How had she been so lucky to get a girlfriend
and
a baby? She wished Aunt Olympe were around, but she'd moved to Liberia to help the many limbless with their new prosthetics. She would be so proud. True, the pride would've broken up into pessimism pretty quickly, citing Rose's low matchmaking success rate. The magnitude of Rose's enthusiasm for her inherited compulsion was equaled only by the number of failed matches she'd arranged. On second thought, maybe it was better that her naturally doomsaying aunt was unavailable. Who needed a discouraging bummer of an aunt, always there to remind Rose of her most colorfully catastrophic matches? Rose would make her little Justine-and-Babette/Walter family succeed if it fucking killed her.

Right now, in the comforting, adult audience of Dr. Nomb, was the most confident Rose had felt since she first saw Justine, at Crammed Shelf,
in dire need of rescue from Welcome Matt, in need of a book, one that Rose happened to know well, and which she could find on the shelf in the dark. Rose had been a wreck all the rest of that day, and the day after that, and every following instant, each of which seemed to increase the probability that Justine would disappear forever. That Justine had still been checked into the Room two weeks later was lucky; that she'd answered the door, that she'd blushed maroon at the sight of Rose, that she'd not screeched in fear or wrinkled in disgust or broken into giggles at the presentation of Rose's unique physiology, was luckier still; that she was going to bear them a baby, that she seemed to love Rose back without the intrusion of the creepy “love” she got from most lovers, all of whom were interested only in
la difference,
that she had those pretty mermaid eyes… incomprehensibly lucky.

“Dr. Nomb?” said Rose. “What about… relations? Is that okay?”

“Sex is fine. Limit acrobatics.”

“What if I wanted to abort it?”

Rose gasped. Dr. Nomb seemed unmortifiable, but Justine's question obviously came as a surprise.

“It's too late for that.”

The doctor, communicating with only a single, subtle crimping of her left cheek-apple, added:
And that's final, young lady.

“The internet says it's never too late.”

“The internet is wrong. The internet is the worst thing to happen to the profession of medicine since sympathetic powder.”

“What?”

“Just do as I say.”

XVIII

September 1969

When Lou Borger had gotten arrested for driving under the influence of beer, he'd had nearly four dollars in his billfold.

That was three weeks ago, and he was sure that the four dollars would disappear sometime while his billfold and all his personal belongings were growing moldy in some locker at the Texas City jail, an institution to which he had been sentenced to serve twenty-one days, the penalty Judge Melville Lipscomb had handed down.

“Also,” said Judge Melville Lipscomb, who was sweating through his robes in the un-air-conditioned courtroom, “your pickemup truck is sentenced to one year in impound. Yonnastannat?”

“Yes, Judge,” said Lou.

“And I am revoking your license. Yonnastannat?”

“I understand, Judge, thank you, sir.”

The three weeks had passed quickly. Too quickly; Lou really had no desire to be out in the world again, as it meant job hunting. The night before he was arrested, he'd been fired from his offshore work for drinking on the
job; this state of affairs led to more drinking—twenty-four hours' worth—and, ultimately, another DUI, another city-jail stretch, and another pending release into a world that demanded he have a job. In order to obtain a job, it was best not to be drunk. So, intent on making the best of his release, Lou made an oath to quit drinking. More specifically, he had sworn in the presence of Leghorn, his cellmate, in jail for chicken fighting, that he'd do his level best to honor it.

“Leg,” Lou'd said, removing an issue of
Texas Monthly
that Leghorn had fashioned into a little tent and placed over his eyes in order to simulate night, “wake up. I need you to be a witness to a new leaf I'm fixing to turn. I finally crossed that line—they got my truck and my license to drive it.”

“Go away,” said Leghorn, turning over on his lower bunk to face the wall, which was covered in newspaper girdle ads. “I am having a pleasant dream of a magical machine that is vending large Clark Bars, and po'boys with large shrimps, what is in the velvet lobby of a magical whorehouse, where I am welcomed for free every day by women of the Amazon.”

“Look here,” said Lou, flapping an envelope over Leghorn's face. “I wrote it down. Listen: ‘I, Lou Borger, of Left Prong Molasses Bayou, Texas, USA, hereby will try as best I can to never empty another bottle of beer or glass of vodka or wine or highball, because I am always finding myself in jail after, and now I have no truck because of it. It is not good for my future.' So, look. Wake up and notarize.”

Lou poked Leghorn behind the ear with the envelope.

“Ow. Later, man.”

“No, now, Leg,” said Lou. “My sentence is almost up, and I need a witness. It'll just take a minute. Just read it, then sign it down here at the corner. Then bite the paper someplace to make little divots in it, like a real notary stamp.”

Leghorn growled and sat up.

“You will let me return to my dreams?”

“Why, certainly,” said Lou.

“Give me your paper.”

Lou gave it to Leghorn, who signed it, and then bit it, leaving a moist semicircle of irregular, carious dents in the lower right corner.

“Here. Now go away.”

“You got the paper wet.”

“Please tell Dot that I miss her.”