Things You Should Know (6 page)

She watches how they work, how they sweep the deck of the bathhouse, set up umbrellas, how they respond to authority—taking direction from the man with the clipboard. Before settling on two or three of the strongest, most dominant, she watches how they play with each other. She chooses the one with the smoothest chest, and another with white hair, like feathers fanning out, crawling up his stomach, a fern bleached blond.

They are becoming themselves as she is losing herself.

It’s not like she’s been alone for the whole year—she’s dated. I have a friend. We have a friend. He has a friend. The friend of a friend. He has four children from two marriages, they visit every other Saturday. He’s a devoted father. I know someone else, a little afraid of commitment, good-looking, successful, never married. And then there’s the widower—at least he understands grief.

The man from two marriages wants her to wear a strap-on dildo and whack him with a riding crop. The one afraid of commitment is impotent. Even that she doesn’t mind until he tells her that it is because of her. The widower is sympathetic. He becomes determined to get her pregnant, “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll put a bun in the oven.” He comes before they even begin. “It’s not for lack of trying,” he says.

And then there’s the one who never wants children. “I would never want to subject someone so innocent to the failings of my personality,” he says. And she agrees.

The idea of them causes her gut to tighten.

The heat is gaining, the beach swelling with the ranks of the weekenders. It is Friday afternoon, they hit the sand acting as if they own it.

A whistle blows downwind, the boys grab the float and are into the water. “It’s no game,” the head honcho says as they pull someone out, sputtering.

Two cops in dark blue uniforms walk onto the beach and arrest a man lying on the sand. They take him away in handcuffs and flip-flops, his towel tossed over his shoulder. She overhears an explanation. “Violated an order of protection, stalking his ex-girlfriend. She saw him from the snack bar and dialed 911.”

The temperature goes up.

She is sticky, salt-sticky, sex-sticky, too-much-sun-sticky. Walking back to the parking lot, she steps in something hot and brown. She walks on, hoping it’s tar, knowing it’s shit,
walks rubbing her foot in the sand, wanting it off before she gets to the car.

The day is turning sour. In the drugstore, by the pharmacy counter, where a long line of people wait to pick up prescriptions for swimmer’s ear, athlete’s foot, Lyme disease, someone pinches her elbow.

She turns. Still sun-blind, she has the sensation of everything being down a dark tunnel, her eyes struggle to adjust.

“All better?” the woman asks.

She nods, still not sure whom she’s talking to—someone from before.

“You don’t come to the club anymore?”

She catches the woman looking into her basket: sunblock, bottled water, condoms, ovulation kits, plastic gloves, pregnancy tests, aspirin.

“Seeing somebody special?”

“Not really,” she says.

“What’s the saying—‘Don’t marry the ones you fuck? Don’t fuck the ones you marry?’ I can never remember how it goes.”

She says nothing. She used to think she was on a par with the others, that for the most part she was ahead of the pack, and now it’s as if she’s fallen behind, out of the running. She feels the woman inspecting her, judging, looking through her basket, evaluating, as if about to issue her a summons, a reprimand for unconventional behavior.

At home, she showers, pours herself a glass of wine. If the accident threw her life off course, her grandmother’s death made it clear that if this was something she wanted to do, she needed to do it soon, before it was too late. She pees on an ovulation stick, the stripe is positive—sometime within the next twenty-four hours the egg will be released. She pictures the egg in launch position, getting ready to burst out, she pictures it floating down her tubes, floating like slow-motion flying.

She slips back in time. A routine doctor’s appointment, an annual occasion; naked in a paper robe, her feet in the stirrups.

“Come down a little closer,” the doctor says. Using the speculum like pliers, he pries her open. He pulls the light closer and peers inside her.

“I’ve been wondering about timing—in terms of having a baby, how much longer do I have?”

“Have you ever been pregnant?”

“No,” she says. “Never pregnant.”

Everyone she knows has been pregnant, pregnant by boyfriends they hated, boyfriends who asked, Can’t you get rid of it? or, worse yet, promised to marry them. Why has she never been pregnant? Was she too good, too boring, too responsible, or is there something else?

“Have you ever tried to get pregnant?”

“I haven’t felt ready to start a family.”

He continues to root around inside her. “You may feel a little scrape—that’s the Pap test.” She feels the scrape. “Try,” he says. “That’s the way to get pregnant, try and try again. It doesn’t get any easier,” he says, pulling the equipment out, snapping the gloves off.

Dressed, she sits in his office.

“I was thinking of freezing some eggs, saving them for later.”

“If you want to have a baby, have a baby, don’t freeze one.” He scribbles something in her chart and closes it. He stands. “Give my regards to your mother. I never see her anymore.”

“She had a hysterectomy ten years ago.”

Sperm banks. She looked them up online; one sent a list of possible candidates categorized by ethnic background, age, height, and years of education, another sent a video with an infertile couple holding hands and talking about choosing donor insemination. She imagined what would
happen later, when the child asked, Who is my father? She couldn’t imagine saying R144, or telling the child that she’d chosen the father because he had neat handwriting, he liked the color green, and was “good with people.” She would rather tell her child the story of the guards, and that she was born of the sea.

Her preparations begin in earnest at dusk. As other people are shaking up the martinis, she puts on her costume: her sex pants with nothing underneath, a silk undershirt, and then the insulated top she wore when they went skiing. She rubs Avon Skin So Soft over her hands, feet, face. She puts on two pairs of high socks, in part for warmth, in part to protect against sand fleas, ticks, mosquitoes. She pulls on a hooded sweat jacket, zips it, and looks in the mirror—perfectly unremarkable. She looks like one of those women who walk a dog alone at night, a mildly melancholy soul.

She fills the pockets of her sweat jacket with condoms—Friday night, there’ll be lots of activity. She now thinks of herself as some sort of a sex expert, a not-for-profit hooker.

She cruises through town, stopping in at the local convenience store, ice cream parlor, pizza place, the parking lot behind the A&P, getting a feel for the night to come.

There are families walking down Main Street, fathers pushing strollers, mothers holding their toddlers’ hands.

She hears the sound of a baby crying and has the urge to run toward it, believing that she alone understands the depth of that cry, profound, existential. There is something unnameable about her desire, unknowable unless you have found yourself looking at children wondering how you can wrest them from their parents, unknowable unless you have that same need. She wants to watch someone grow, unfold—she likes the name Mom.

She drives farther out of town, scouting. She goes to where they live—crash pads, shacks that would be uninhab
itable if they weren’t right by the beach. She knows where they live because one rainy afternoon she followed a truck-load of them home.

There are no cars, no signs of life. A picnic table outside one of the shacks has a couple of half-empty glasses on it. The door is open—it’s actually off its hinges, so she doesn’t feel so bad going in.

Stepping inside, she breathes deeply, sharp perfume. Dark, dank, brown shag carpeting, a musty smell, like old sneakers—hard to know if it’s the house or the boys. Bags of chips, Coke cans, dirty socks, T-shirts, pizza cartons on the counter. It’s an overnight version of the guard shack. Four bedrooms, none of the sheets match. In the bathroom a large tube of toothpaste, a dripping faucet, grime, toilet seat up, a single bar of soap, two combs and a brush—all of it like a stable stall you’d want to muck out.

She pokes around, taking a T-shirt she knows belongs to her best boy. She takes a pair of shorts from another one, a baseball hat from a third, socks from a fourth. It’s not that she needs so much, but this way no one will think much of it, at most it will be a load of laundry gone missing.

As though the boys were still at summer camp, their names are written into the back of their clothes, each in his own handwriting—Charlie, Todd, Travis, Cliff.

She drives back to town, to a different beach, moodier, more desolate. Hunkering down in the dunes, she immediately spots two people in the water—male and female. She takes out her birding glasses, identifying the boy—one of the older ones, diving naked into the waves. He swims toward the woman and she swims away. Hide and go seek. The woman comes out of the water, revealing herself, long brown hair, her body rounded and ripe, a woman, not a girl. He swims to shore, climbs out after her, and pulls her down onto the sand. She frees herself and runs back into the water. He goes after her and, pretending to rescue her, car
ries her out of the sea to a towel spread over the sand. They are like animals, tearing at each other. He stops for a moment, rummages through his clothing, takes something out—she can’t see what, but she’s hopeful. Their mating is violent, desperate. The woman both fights him and asks for more. He is biting the woman, mounting her from the back, the woman is on her hands and knees like a dog, and she seems to like it.

Finished, they pack up. They walk past her, see her, nod hello as though nothing ever happened. The woman is older, wild-looking, a kind of earthy goddess.

When they are gone she hurries across the sand. She finds the condom half covered in sand—limp debris. Something about the intensity of their coupling, so sexual, so graphic, leaves her not wanting to touch it. She unzips her fanny pack, pulls out a pair of latex examination gloves, pulls them on and then carefully rescues the sample—2.5 cc, usable if a little sandy.

She goes back to the car, assumes the position, and, making an effort to be discreet, inseminates. She stays in position for half an hour and then continues her rounds.

The romance of the hunt. She walks up and down looking for her men. The beaches are crowded with bonfires, picnics, catered parties. The air is filled with the scent of starter fluid, meat cooking; barbecue embers pulse, radiant red like molten lava.

She puts on the night-vision glasses, the world glows the green of things otherworldly and outside of nature. Everything is dramatic, everything is inverted, every gesture is evidence, every motion has meaning. She is seeing in the dark, seeing what can’t be seen. A cigarette sails through the night like a tracer. She has to maximize, it’s not enough to try just once, she wants to fill herself, she wants many, multiple, may the best man win. She wants competition, she wants there to be a race, a blend, she wants it to mix and match.

It is still early—the girl doesn’t get off until ten or possibly eleven. She lies back in the sand, rubbing the points on her head where the screws were, dreaming. She glances up at the bathhouse. On the roof is a weather vane—a whale, a mounted Moby spinning north, south, east, west, to tell which way the wind blows, its outline sharp against the sky. She dreams of old whalers, fishermen, dreams she is in a boat, far from shore, in the middle of the open sea. She thinks of her grandmother, freeing her. She thinks of how proud her grandmother would be that she’s taken things in hand.

Finally they arrive. Creatures of habit, they go back to the same spot where they were yesterday, this time moving with greater urgency. There is something genuine, heartfelt in the sex habits of the young—it is all new, thrilling, scary, a mutual adventure.

She retrieves and extracts her second sample. In the car, with her hips up high, she inseminates and she waits.

She imagines all of it mingling in her like sea foam. She imagines that with the sperm and the sand, she will make a baby born with pearl earrings in her ears.

In the local paper there is a notice for a childbirthing class. She goes, thinking she should be ready, she should know more. There are only two couples; a boy and girl still in high school and a local couple in their mid-thirties—the husband and wife both look pregnant, both sip enormous sodas throughout the class.

“When are you due?” the instructor asks each of them.

“In three weeks,” the girl says, rubbing her belly, polishing the baby to perfection. “We didn’t plan for the pregnancy, so we thought we better plan for the birth.”

“Four weeks,” the other woman says, sucking on her straw.

“And you?”

“I’m working on it,” she says. And no one asks more.

On the table is an infant doll, a knitted uterus, and a bony pelvis.

“Your baby wants you,” the childbirth teacher says, picking up the doll and passing it around.

The doll ends up with her. She holds it, thinking it would be rude to put it back down on the table—she might seem like a bad mother. She holds it, patting the plastic diaper of the plastic infant, pretending to comfort it. She sits the doll on her lap and continues taking notes: gestational age, baby at three weeks, three months, six months, nine months, dilation of the cervix, the stages of labor.

“All pregnancies end in birth,” the instructor says, holding up the knitted uterus.

Leaving the hospital, she runs into the cop coming out of the emergency room.

“You all right?” she asks.

“Stepped on a rusty nail and had to get a tetanus shot.” He rubs his arm. “So, how about that coffee?”

“Absolutely, before the end of summer,” she says, getting into her car.

She is a woman waiting for her life to begin. She waits, counting the days. Her breasts are sore, full, like when they were first budding. She waits, thinking something is happening, and then it is not. There is a stain in her underwear, faint, light, like smoke, and overnight she begins to bleed. She bleeds thick, old blood, like rust. She bleeds bright red blood, like a gunshot wound. She bleeds heavily. She feels herself, hollow, fallow, failed. And bleeding, she mourns all that has not happened, all that will never happen. She mourns the boys, the men, the fiancé, her grandmother, the failings of her family, and her own peculiar shortcomings that have put her in this position.