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, carries 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.