Things You Should Know(18)

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 uninhabitable 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.