Hi everyone at Necessary Fiction. Thanks for having me on as November’s Writer in Residency—you’re all going to be walking a crazy journey with me as I prepare to leave for a month in Kenya (departing December 1 and returning New Year’s Eve.) This, in addition to my usual, chaotic schedule of running an indie book press (Other Voices Books), an online Fiction magazine (The Nervous Breakdown), revising a new novel for my agent, teaching at Columbia College-Chicago, and juggling three kids (10 year old twin girls and a son, age four) . . . November’s going to be a wild ride. Add to that the fact that I just had braces put on my teeth (long story!), and consequently haven’t eaten in days and am popping a lot of painkillers, and this should add up to an interesting residency.
I’ll kick off the residency by posting the story that’s getting my ass sent on a free ride to Kenya. I won the Summer Literary Seminars writing contest, judged by Mary Gaitskill, for my story “Cafe de Flore,” originally published on Five Chapters, an awesome online lit mag run by David Daley. The story will reappear in Fence magazine sometime soon, a magazine I’ve long admired.
I should add that I’ve worshipped Mary Gaitskill’s writing for two decades, so just knowing she picked my story would have been “prize” enough—but instead I’m getting sent to Kenya for this amazing program, “Kenya Between the Lines,” that takes place in both Nairobi and Lamu. My husband, David, and I had to find a way to make a free trip expensive for us (let’s call this trait “travel masochism,” and it’s a trait we’ve long suffered from and that I never plan to give up), and promptly bought tickets for him, our three kids, and his dad to join me on the second half of my trip, culminating in a family safari over Christmas. It all feels surreal, still, but I leave exactly one month from today.
Then, basically, we’re all eating ramen noodles for every meal during the entire year of 2011 . . . which I guess works for me since I have braces on my teeth anyway, and can’t chew anything interesting.
And if you’re interested in going to Kenya too, check out Summer Literary Seminars.
More soon—
***
Cafe de Flore
Her senses were different now, since the baby. Things jolted her. She heard crying that was not there. Sometimes, she felt the baby’s weight on her chest, heavy against her heart and breasts, and woke up gasping only to find the baby asleep in her own dresser drawer across the bedroom.
Rebecca’s hands had acquired a permanent shake, the kind she remembered her grandmother having. She knew it was from carrying the baby constantly while also trying to do things for Leo, who never let her alone when his father was at work. He followed her and the baby, jabbering, asking, wanting. She had ignored him at first, but then he took Daniel’s electric razor and shaved down the middle of his head; then he buttered the dog, even its small pink anus and the insides of its ears. Now she sometimes tied Leo to the defunct radiator when she couldn’t tend to him, when the baby was screaming. A normal child would cry at this, she knew, but Leo didn’t seem offended by being tethered like a horse. It didn’t shut him up either, but if she closed the door she didn’t hear him much over the baby’s screaming.
The car horn out front had been blaring for some time by the time Rebecca heard it. This made her proud of herself in an imprecise way. The constant noise-level in Greenwich Village existed at a pitch that would seem jarring in most places — certainly on Long Island! — but had come, instead, to sound merely like background static from a radio program to Rebecca. She rolled over, thinking Daniel would be asleep — he rarely responded to stimuli of any kind these days once evening hit and he had his shot. Instead, seeing his shadowed, bearded form already upright, she realized it was actually Daniel who’d woken her, not the noise itself. He was prodding her arm saying, “Baby, it’s wild, you’ve gotta see this, it’s a six-ring circus outside, come on.” She rose, senseless from the bed, hands trembling while the baby slept on for once (and how dare Daniel wake her while the baby was actually sleeping?) Still she went to the window to see.
In front of the apartment, across from the park, a man had fallen asleep — passed out — in his car. His head had fallen on the steering wheel, somehow with sufficient force to activate his horn. Either the man was very heavy — Rebecca couldn’t tell from here—or the horn was busted, because it just kept going like someone was blowing into it with all the air in the world. On the pavement, neighbors had started trickling out of their apartments, spilling loosely into the street to see what was causing the racket. Two men in motorcycle leather — they must have come from the park — had procured (or already came equipped with) black sticks like the kind police carried and were beating the car window, shouting at the man, who was dead to the world, to get out.
Next to Rebecca, Daniel threw back his head in laughter, the bulge of his Adam’s apple so vulnerable that she had to look away.
* * *
She was already pregnant when they had moved in. Greenwich Village, Rebecca had boasted to her few friends still speaking to her since Daniel — and though they said she was crazy, she believed they were impressed too. Someday, this would be like telling people you used to hang around Café de Flore when Simone de Beauvoir was just at the next table scribbling in her notebooks. Greenwich Village was rundown, sure, but full of artists, bohemians, thinkers like Daniel. Unheard of things happened here. In their first few weeks in the neighborhood, Rebecca would drag Daniel through Washington Square Park on weekends, delighting like a child when a grown man decked out in a pink chiffon dress buzzed by on roller skates. He’s called the Peach Fairy, she wrote to her best friend from high school, now majoring in education at Syracuse. Everyone in the neighborhood called him that — you only had to be in earshot to know — but still Rebecca imagined the way her letters made her sound like an insider to some hidden, glamorous world beyond the ken of would-be-teachers at Syracuse. Weekends, she and Daniel would stroll past the swings and sandbox hand-in-hand, and Rebecca would say, Here’s where I’ll be spending my time once the baby comes, until Daniel showed her that the sandbox was mainly used as a latrine by the drunks, bums and junkies in the park — until she realized that if she went walking alone, without Daniel, men hissed at her constantly asking if she wanted to pick up some dope even though she was starting to show. Clearly it would be impossible to bring a baby here. Clearly, if her friends were impressed at all, it was from a distance. No one would ever, ever visit.
They were not married. Her parents had wanted them to get married, and so they had not: it was as simple as that. By that time, Daniel’s parents had already mainly stopped speaking to him anyway. They kept in sporadic touch because of Leo, but as it became more and more apparent that the boy wasn’t quite right, their interest waned. They had already given up on Daniel before Rebecca ever met him. Back, Rebecca supposed, when Leo’s mother had become pregnant, and Daniel hadn’t married her either, and then she took off and left him with Leo when Leo was only three. Who knew where that girl was now? Daniel had never tried to find her, he said; he was glad she’d split. She was a whiner, and getting fat, and couldn’t handle her drugs, and her brains were shit and that was why Leo was “off.” Good riddance to her. Daniel made little money as a philosophy grad student, so supported Leo by working as a mover too; the boy stayed with an old woman down the hall from the apartment Daniel had rented when Rebecca first met him. That babysitter was the one who gave Rebecca the idea about the radiator — it had terrified her at the time, that Daniel would leave his son with a person like that — but now she saw the wisdom in the old woman’s advice. The old woman had used a dog leash, but Rebecca used gauzy, colorful scarves.
Rebecca had been nineteen when she let Daniel make her come with his fingers under the table of the campus bar where he hung out with the other TAs. She had been to a bar only once before, with her older cousin Jacob. She didn’t like the taste of beer, but liked the way Daniel’s dark hair curled into the collars of his shirts like a twisting vine slowly unfurling its dominance over a building until it overtook everything civilized and man-made — often, while Daniel spoke in class, Rebecca imagined him naked, his hair gone wild and snaking long around his limbs. She was having some troubles in the course — with concentration, with Hegel — and so Daniel had invited her for a drink after class to discuss how he could help. Once his hand had already rubbed its rough heel against her pubic hair, she let him show her the first chapter of his novel at his apartment, and by morning even let him make love to her without using protection because she was starting to spot, so she couldn’t get pregnant. There wasn’t much blood yet, but Daniel had whispered to her, “It’s sacred. I’d bathe in it if I could. I’d drink it up.” That frightened her a little, and she was glad it was only his penis touching the blood, which was old and used-up and dirty in the eyes of God and her parents and every sane person on the planet earth. A penis was more impersonal than a mouth, and she didn’t want his mouth touching her there right then. She wondered if maybe he was crazy. It turned her on too.
Soon she had grown nauseous and fat, and she expected Daniel to leave her once she told him, but he didn’t. At first she couldn’t believe the worldly, adult turn her life had taken. Suddenly, she and Daniel were hand-in-hand in the park, their long hair flowing, her belly beginning to bulge. Rebecca loved the way anyone over forty eyed them with suspicion or distaste—loved the way others in their long-haired, unmarried tribe came right up to them in public and spoke as if they were longtime friends. In college, she had been a member of a Jewish sorority, and now she saw that Daniel’s life was a sorority or fraternity of sorts, too, but larger, on the verge of an explosion — a dangerous, exotic fraternity veering out of control. There were marches, protests, arrests — she never stayed long enough to get arrested since she was pregnant, of course, but the nearness of it all felt like constant foreplay. But then it turned out that Daniel used smack much more frequently than the once a month he’d told Rebecca. Then it turned out that Daniel got fired twice in one month and now they could not afford a phone. Soon he was shooting up every night, and because she didn’t see him during the day when he was working, who could say how much more often? They moved into an even cheaper apartment, but at least it was a two-bedroom so Leo no longer had to sleep in the living room. When the baby was older, they could move it in with Leo, if Leo could be trusted by then not to step on it or smother it in its sleep. They made their plans in their dark bed, Rebecca struggling to get comfortable inside the bulk of her body, Daniel nodding, going off on tangents, sometimes starting to snore open-mouthed while she was in the middle of a sentence. She turned twenty in her seventh month. Old enough, her mothers friends would say, to know better.
- * *
“What’s going on, Dad?” Leo squeaked. He came into the room without knocking, and instead of waiting for an answer the way Rebecca had always imagined children would be, streamed right into, “Who’re those guys, how come they’re hitting our car, what’s that old man doing in the car how’d he get in there dad are you gonna go down there and stop them before they break the window what’s going on?”
Rebecca tried not to hear him. Outside, the nightsticks couldn’t seem to shatter that car’s windshield. She marveled. Who knew that an ordinary car, for an ordinary person, would be equipped with nearly shatterproof glass?
Daniel screamed, “Holy shit!” Then: “Baby, that’s our fucking car!”
Rebecca stared. Daniel had owned the same car when she met him that they did now. She did not know how to drive, but sat in the passenger’s seat anytime they left the city, which wasn’t often now that her parents weren’t speaking to her. Still, even now that Leo had pointed it out and Daniel was screaming and running for the stairwell — even as she narrowed her eyes and stared hard — she found she recognized it not at all.
* * *
For some reason, there was still a vestige of the nice Jewish boy in Daniel, and perhaps that was why he slammed the door behind him instead of letting it flap open wide in the night, so that any neighbor could gawk at his wife’s veinous, milk-filled tits through her thin nightgown; so that his hyperactive, possibly mentally ill son could run amok out into the hall. He closed the door against the prying eyes of others like themselves, down on their luck or never acquainted with luck in the first place, from eyes like Cargill’s, who had already seen more of Daniel’s wife than her milky tits. The door slammed, louder due to its proximity than the beating of the nightsticks against the windshield downstairs. Leo, yelling, “Dad, can I come with you?” jumped.
That was when the baby began to cry.
* * *
When they first met Cargill, Daniel thought he was a cool guy. Cargill was about the age of their fathers, but his old lady was Rebecca’s age and a real live Indian, with smooth black hair all the way down to her ass. Neither Daniel nor Rebecca had ever met an Indian before, but the fact that Cargill lived and consorted with one made him seem worldly and hip to them in a way they could not articulate, even to one another. Rebecca was already starting to show by then, and Cargill’s lover’s lithe body reminded her of her former self, of her college days which already seemed eons ago and all the sexy, tight-skinned, long-limbed girls who sauntered around the quad in filmy skirts and short skirts letting the sun brown their invincible skin. Already Rebecca felt old and dowdy next to Cargill’s woman, but because she still hoped to return to that former self once the baby came out of her, she thought it would be good to befriend this girl, whose name was Denise — though Cargill called her “Tonto,” a fact that both scandalized and titillated Rebecca and Daniel — so that once she looked like her normal self again, she would already have a beautiful, young girlfriend with whom to pal around. Though she knew it didn’t make her seem very attractive, she found herself, after a few glasses of wine, complaining to Cargill and Denise about her horrible morning sickness, how it hadn’t faded after the first trimester like people said it would, and wasn’t just in the morning either but twenty-four hours per day. All she had to do was clean hair from a brush or touch a piece of raw broccoli or smell an unwashed bath towel and she was on her knees retching. That was when Cargill suggested that maybe she should drop by his clinic.
He owned the building. Daniel had said, “Be real sweet to him when you go over there. We gotta befriend them, baby. We’ll have ‘em over again, get them high again, shoot the breeze some more, and maybe pretty soon they’ll give us a break on the rent. He doesn’t need the money. He’s a doctor, he must be loaded.”
Rebecca knew that it made no sense to think Cargill had money. No one with money would possibly live here. But the smack had gone to Daniel’s brain now. He didn’t write his novel anymore, or recite poetry to her, or rant about Heidegger, or rail at the television about Vietnam, or even the radio now that they didn’t have a television. He didn’t care about anything, and his erection rarely stuck around for long, and he was losing his looks. But Rebecca was growing big and was too sick to work and her parents had written her off so totally and seemingly without remorse that she would have let herself be covered with molasses and buried in an anthill before going back to them with her hand out. She was trapped.
So even though she knew Cargill was no kind of real doctor like stupid Daniel thought he was, he was still her best hope.
* * *
Outside, Daniel burst onto the street, all thrashing limbs and guttural railing. Rebecca recognized Leo in him, and all at once realized the terror Daniel’s ex-old lady must have felt when she saw the two men she was stuck with: how strangely and irrevocably damaged they both were, and how she would have to play nursemaid to them both forever. It was enough, really, to make any girl run. Daniel had picked up an umbrella from next to the door and he was swinging it like a weapon, shouting at the bikers, “Get the fuck away from my car!”
The bikers didn’t register him at first. They were intent on breaking the windshield, and while Rebecca could see cracks in it, small circular cave-ins that, from this distance, resembled intricate spiders webs, the glass refused to shatter so they could push it aside and reach in to pull the old drunk out and kick him senseless. It occurred to Rebecca for the first time — really, it should have been abundantly clear from the first — that the old man, despite the bikers’ efforts to abuse him — must already be dead and hence long past their desire to beat him senseless.
Daniel could have, at any time up to a certain point, turned around and come back into the building. The bikers did not care about him. Though he was hollering at the top of his lungs about it being his car, no one seemed interested in this fact or — probably — even believed him. There were a lot of crazies in the neighborhood, and right now, with his undershirt and boxer shorts and junkie’s pallor and spit-flying rage, Daniel looked very much the part of one of them. He could have come back inside and put his head onto Rebecca’s lap and said, Baby there were two of them and they had sticks and I just had this useless umbrella, I’m sorry there was nothing I could do, and Rebecca would have comforted him even if insincerely, because what little work he still procured paid their bills, and because she didn’t care about the car she couldn’t drive and they barely used, and because Daniel could still elicit pity from her out of the ashes of what had once felt like love, and because, as she realized daily, she had nowhere else to go.
Instead, he kept shouting. Until he, too, had become part of the static, the background noise it took awhile to register, and eventually the neighbors and the bikers turned to face him, and he came at the two men with his waving umbrella, and in the bedroom the baby was screaming so loudly that Rebecca could no longer hear what was being said on the street below.
* * *
Cargill’s “office” was really just one of the apartments. Not the one he lived in with Denise, but an unfinished one with nothing but an examining table and an old sofa with the stuffing leaking out one end, and a straight-back chair in front of a folding table. These pieces of furniture were shoved into one room; the kitchen and bedroom were empty, the floors and walls bare. Rebecca could see a thin film of dust on the floor of the kitchen, as though Cargill — or whoever cleaned in here — had only ever tended to the small patch of apartment where the furniture dwelled. When she went to the bathroom (she constantly had to pee), a roach ran from the toilet paper roll and up the wall.
Back near the cluster of furniture, Cargill had her lie down on the examining table. He felt her abdomen, which made her self-conscious, and pulled her shirt up to listen to her heart with a stethoscope — the materialization of which, from his pocket reassured her. None of Rebecca’s bras fit well anymore, but she had put one on for the occasion, so that Cargill wouldn’t think she was trying to flaunt her inflated body before him, to seduce him in exchange for the lower rent she knew Daniel would eventually hit him up for. After he had listened to her heart, though, Cargill handed her a hospital gown — a real hospital gown — and told her to go into the bathroom to change so he could do a pelvic exam.
A sick, numb feeling had started to spread over Rebecca’s limbs, making them heavy and ineffectual. She imagined telling Cargill indignantly that she had no intention of getting undressed and realized how absurd she would sound. She was pregnant for God’s sake — everything about her medical state had to do with her pelvis! And though he did not have a medical degree that she knew of, his practice was real—she had lived in the apartment long enough to know that he had many patients, most of them female and about her age. Denise’s friends, she assumed. Surely Denise wouldn’t refer her friends if her old man were a quack or a pervert. Cargill had said “women’s troubles” were his specialty. As she disrobed in the bathroom, she reminded herself of her parents, full of mistrust for anyone without the proper degree or societal stamp of approval. Labels were all they cared about. Certainly they didn’t care about her, their knocked-up daughter who had betrayed all they stood for by loving Daniel. She imagined what Daniel would think if he saw her here shirking in the bathroom like some square virgin who thought the world was dying for a glimpse of her precious snatch. Rebecca slipped on the robe and opened the door.
She had never had a pelvic exam before, but it comforted her that Cargill did not seem excited by touching her. His fingers felt cold and thick and hurt a bit, but she was pregnant, and everything hurt these days. Soon enough he withdrew them. Then he asked her to sit, and when she did he untied the gown from behind her neck and took it off entirely. He squeezed her breast, asking if her milk had come in yet. Before she could answer, he squeezed the other, saying, “No.”
Then he crossed the room to the straight-backed chair and sat in it. The hospital gown was still in his lap, so Rebecca sat nude on the table while he began to talk. She was reminded, abruptly, of Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a painting she had studied in an art history class. Unlike at a normal doctor’s office, there was no sheet on the table, either paper or real. The faux-leather felt cold.
“You’d be surprised how many girls have your exact problem,” Cargill said cheerfully, waving her gown a bit for emphasis. “You don’t eat a lot of garlic, do you?”
“Garlic?” Rebecca asked, folding her hands (primly, stupidly) over her thatch of pubic hair.
“Yeah. Cook with it, brew it as a tea, that sort of thing?”
“Oh. Uhh.” Lately, she and Daniel ate cereal or toast for just about every meal. Daniel was a vegetarian, but he didn’t seem to actually like vegetables, and now with her nausea . . . “No.”
“That’s what I thought. Your body is full of bacteria and yeast. Garlic is a natural anti-fungal, a natural bacteria fighter. You’ve let your system get all, like, depleted, which is even worse now that you’re pregnant. It’s still early, though — you’re what, eighteen, nineteen weeks in? It probably hasn’t hurt the baby yet.”
Rebecca’s heart skipped. She wanted to call Daniel, but it was impossible to reach him when he was working, and besides, Cargill’s office did not seem to have a phone.
“Lucky for you it’s easy to fix.” Cargill absently put down her gown and began running his fingers through his long gray hair, as if with agitation at her stupidity. He looked around tersely for something, making choppy movements around the card table before finding a rubber band and pulling his hair back into a ponytail. Strands immediately fell out and back around his skinny face. “Garlic suppositories are more effective than any medication on the market. You take these, you’ll swear by them. You’ll never let one of those quacks prescribe antibiotics for you again!” He pounded the card table, and one of its legs buckled a little.
He did not cover her with the gown during the procedure. She lay on her back with her knees bent up towards her chest, bumping against the protrusion of her belly as he inserted the first clove, massaging it inside her anus “for maximum absorbency.” She felt pressure against her uterus and her bladder and wondered mutely if he was poking the baby. She kept her face impassive despite the feeling that she might urinate — for a reason she couldn’t place, it had become extremely important that she tell herself she believed Cargill was genuinely trying to help her. When she thought of jumping up and shouting Get your fucking hands off me, old man!, the image humiliated her so much she forced it from her mind, asking Cargill innocuously whether Denise had a job and listening as he described the cafe she worked at, Sutter’s, where all the writers who would “be anything” in the seventies now hung out. Here on the table, with this man her father’s age massaging her rectum, she told herself she was merely a patient — hip and sophisticated and unperturbed and open to unorthodox medical practices. On the other side of that persona, screaming pervert, Rebecca saw a naïve Jewish girl, dumb enough to walk right into the lion’s den and take off her clothes — a girl not fit for life on her own. If she were that girl, then her parents were right, and everything she had done up until now was a mistake, and the baby was coming, and she would never dig her way out.
After she dressed in the bathroom and emerged, Cargill waved to her from his card table where he sat scribbling. He held the paper aloft, affably calling out, “Your chart, so we can keep track of your treatments!” She mumbled back, “Cool,” and staggered towards the door, tossing the $20 fee onto a dingy windowsill and running up the two flights of stairs to her own apartment. There, Leo was tied to the radiator with a box of crackers in case he got hungry. As soon as she came near to untie him he said, “Eeww! You stink!”
When she collapsed next to him, sobbing, he shook her shoulder over and over until it felt like her teeth would dislodge saying, “Stepmom, Stepmom,” even though she had told him three hundred times not to call her that; even though it was not accurate anyway. Shouting, “Stepmom! Hey! What’s the matter what’s the matter what’s wrong?”
* * *
The baby howled so much her little face was purple. She had come out upset about something and still seemed angry or sick or grief-stricken now a week later, but St. Vincent’s had sent Rebecca home, Daniel said because they couldn’t afford the bill. There was nothing seriously wrong with the baby, the doctor insisted. Sometimes the lungs just took a little longer to fully mature. It was summer, so it was all right to take the baby outside, but Rebecca hadn’t been out, not since their return home. She was still bleeding and her breasts were engorged like melons that spilled warm juice everywhere, sweet-smelling, over-ripe juice that fouled everything it touched. The baby didn’t want to eat the rotting melon; she would not grip on right. Sometimes when she was asleep she would latch properly and Rebecca would feel the pull like water rushing down a drain, like the baby was sucking her juices out through a long, sinewy straw, and the relief was exquisite and revolting at once and she could not wait to get the small feral thing off her body, but as soon as the baby had released her, her breasts began to fill again and Rebecca craved her back. If possible, the girl was lighter now than when she’d come out, and even then she’d been barely five pounds. Rebecca leaned against the window frame, dizzy, pulling her breast out unsteadily, careful to face the baby perpendicular to the window so she would not topple out as she writhed, refusing the breast at first then grasping it with thin, fishy lips. Rebecca saw herself shoving her breast almost violently at the baby; its hugeness seemed an unnatural pillow, capable of smothering.
On the street below, sirens approached.
* * *
Daniel’s kneecap had exploded by the time the police descended. He was on the ground howling, and the windshield had finally been smashed, the old man dragged out and tossed against the curb. Rebecca was not sure how this had been achieved, but the horn no longer blared. Daniel was cursing, and one of the bikers kept shaking the stick in his direction, making false jerks forward as a cruel owner might to taunt a dog. But Daniel was not, Rebecca realized, as smart as a dog. He didn’t cower or retreat, merely increased the volume of his insults, dragging himself along the hot asphalt, trying to hop onto his one good leg but unable to gain his balance.
Cargill and Denise were out on the street now with the other neighbors, cans of beer in their hands. When the cops began to drag Daniel off towards the paddy wagon, Cargill called out, “Hey, man, that ain’t fair, it’s his car!” but the police appeared not to even hear him. Daniel was too busy shouting out slogans from Civil Rights marches to point out to the beefy cop lifting him by the armpits that he was the owner of the now-trashed vehicle. He did not look up to their window even once before being driven away into the fledgling rays of sunlight.
Leo had wandered away from the window and was rushing at their dachshund shouting, “GetthefuckawayfrommycaryousonofabitchingNazifucks!,” delivering sharp, clumsy kicks in the dog’s direction, though it scuttled away too fast for more than one jab to hit it, hiding under Rebecca and Daniel’s bed. It had learned, from the buttering incident. The animal behaved like a shell-shocked vet. Sometimes Rebecca thought she should shoot it with some of Daniel’s smack and put it out of its misery.
“Where’d they take Dad?” Leo screamed. “If Dad’s going to jail you’d better find my mom — no way I’m staying here with you!”
Rebecca jumped, jarring the baby awake again. Her throat constricted with irrational tears. She did not know how this could be possible, but she had never realized until that moment that Leo did not like her.
* * *
After they came home from the hospital, Denise had been her only visitor. She brought a small doll for the baby, and Rebecca made cups of coffee with water run hot from the tap because the stove wasn’t working. Denise asked what the little girl’s name was, holding the baby on her lap in a natural way that frightened Rebecca; she knew she did not look as at home holding her own child, and wondered if she ever would. Rebecca admitted that she and Daniel hadn’t agreed on a name yet. Rebecca wanted Susan, after her sister who had died young of a breathing problem. Her sister had been eleven and Rebecca seven, but after Susan was gone neither of her parents ever spoke of her anymore, and the only photograph remaining was one in her parents’ bedroom where Rebecca was not allowed. For years she had still talked to Susan in the quiet of her head, in her bedroom when it was dark. She thought if she called the baby Susan, she might feel closer to the child, like this alien, feral baby in its inexplicable loudness was really her older sister watching over her so that she was not alone. But Daniel wanted Lisa. He thought Susan was an old-fashioned, stodgy name. Rebecca tried to tell him that Susan B. Anthony had been a rebel, but then Daniel countered with Emma, an anarchist’s name. As if Emma weren’t as old-fashioned and stodgy as you could get. Rebecca wanted to tell Denise that lately, Daniel seemed to say things just to oppose her, and now their baby didn’t have a name, and wouldn’t take the breast properly, and screamed all through the night. But Denise’s beauty and unencumbered youth made her nervous, and she hated her a little now because of Cargill and the garlic incident, and instead she drank her coffee in a stilted silence, thinking the doll, which was made of cheap porcelain, was a poor choice in gifts. It would be years before her daughter could play with it.
“So,” she managed, when she and Denise had smoked two cigarettes apiece and the coffee was gone and still Denise didn’t seem to want to leave, “are you going to have babies? You and Cargill?”
Denise snorted. She twisted her long black hair into a knot around her hand, so tight Rebecca saw the tips of her fingers turning white. “Well,” she said with a measured drawl, “maybe if he stops sticking his fingers up other girls’ asses for a living, I’ll consider it.” Then she smiled. “Of course, that’ll never happen as long as there are a line of you willing to pay him for the privilege, will it?”
Rebecca crossed her legs at the ankles. “No,” she said. “I guess not.”
Denise shrugged as though the problem were not terribly relevant. “I’d love a baby, though. Yours is so cute!” She stuck her nose to the baby’s and rubbed. “If you ever need a sitter, you know I only work at Sutter’s part-time, I’d come take care of her. You don’t have to pay me—I mean, like, if it’s only once in a while. Or I could do it for money if you wanted to get a job or something.”
“We don’t have any money,” Rebecca said.
“Yeah, well, that’s, like, why you’d get the job, right?”
“Oh,” Rebecca said. “Yeah. Right.”
“What did you do before this?” Denise asked.
“I was in college. I was going to major in art history.”
“Oh. Wow. Huh.” Denise narrowed her eyes. “You’re Jewish, right?”
Rebecca’s back stiffened. In her experience, this question never led to anything good. Once, a man at a party had asked how she hid her horns. “Yes.”
“You’re lucky,” Denise said. “You people all go to college and stuff, right?”
“Um.” Rebecca shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess a lot of us do, but not everyone. My parents didn’t go to college. But everyone I know from growing up on Long Island did.”
“Cool,” Denise said. “John went to college too.” It took Rebecca a moment to realize Denise must mean Cargill. “He’s real smart. Even if he’s a total fucking lunatic.” She laughed throatily, her hair unwhirling around her fingers swift as a whip.
“Daniel has a Ph.D.,” Rebecca offered. “Well, he’s supposed to have it, but he can’t finish his dissertation because he was too busy writing a novel, and now he can’t finish that either.”
“Why don’t your parents give you some money?” Denise said. “They must be rich if you went to college. Now that you have a baby and all. You could probably move out of here and move in with them.” She looked around the room as though someone might be listening — and, indeed, Leo might have been, but he was quiet and Rebecca didn’t dare tempt fate to check. “You wouldn’t have to bring Daniel. He wouldn’t go if he couldn’t bring his dope. So you and the baby could go. You’d see him when you wanted to. It’d be better than this.”
Rebecca sat silently, considering. Denise had one thin brown leg tucked up under her taut behind on the chair — Rebecca could see the triangle of her underwear through the gap in her legs, the short skirt stretched tight across her lap. Her panties were white. This surprised Rebecca. She found she didn’t want Denise to leave. She didn’t really enjoy her company, but as long as she was here, she would probably keep holding the baby. For some reason, she thought of the time she’d called her mother at 11 p.m., sobbing because she had received an F on her first philosophy paper — Daniel, who it turned out had graded the paper, had written, facile, yet remarkably incoherent for something so simple-minded. Rebecca had wept to her mother, reading the comment aloud, but her mother cut her off mid-stream. “Unless you are dying,” her mother said, in a voice like the one she used on waiters and the housekeeper, “do not ever interrupt our sleep in the middle of the night again.” The dial tone had rung out like a disaster siren in Rebecca’s ear. All the next day, she kept expecting her mother — or maybe Dad instead — to call and apologize, to ask about the paper and how she was doing in her other classes. No call came, and when she spoke to them the following Sunday, at their customary phone time, no mention of the incident was made.
She said to Denise, “My parents are dead.”
* * *
Leo was back asleep by 7 a.m. Rebecca sat at the window smoking, waiting for Daniel to appear around a corner, heading (she imagined him on crutches, somehow procured) towards their apartment. Already she had bundled up all his smack, run out while the baby dozed on the couch, and stuffed it into the first trashcan she saw in Washington Square Park. She knew he would be enraged when he found out. She pictured him punching her, though until that morning she had never seen Daniel hit anyone. She had tossed a couple of maternity dresses — her old clothes didn’t even close to fit her anymore — into a bag along with the porcelain doll Denise had given the baby, and had it propped by the door. Inside were the baby’s five outfits and her already-discolored diapers that she washed by hand. As soon as she got to her parents’ house, she would start giving the baby formula. Her mother would be astonished anyway to see Rebecca breast-feeding when formula was what all the smart, modern women chose. Breast-feeding was for poor women in foreign countries, in National Geographic photos. Not for anyone they knew.
When she glimpsed him, though, Daniel was not on crutches. He was hobbling, holding onto the concrete walls of buildings like a blind man feeling his way. He moved slowly, but within five or ten minutes, he would reach her: she would hear him on the stairs, approaching, coming back to their airless nest, their small, chaotic imitation of a family. He would be here, with Leo whom he had never abandoned, though Rebecca knew many men in his place would have run. She pictured herself arriving in the dead of night on her parents’ doorstep (in reality, it would take only an hour to get there), and the looks on their faces as they surveyed her screaming, underweight, tainted baby. As they looked at her, forever ruined now: an unmarriageable burden. Her father had said he knew a man who could make the pregnancy disappear, that it was not like back-alley coat hanger operations but a real doctor, a Jewish doctor, who would make Rebecca back into the normal girl she was before. Rebecca had raged at him, had called him Fascist! with the same force Daniel’s voice bore when she most admired it, had run from the house with her hair streaming wild. She had been a fool.
Daniel was almost at their street now. From their fifth floor walk-up, she would lose sight of him soon as he got too near. It would be too late. The baby slept in her drawer, Leo in his room. There was no one to bear witness. She would tell her parents the baby had been stillborn. Her father would be shamed by her grief, by the continued fullness of her breasts aching for the small mouth they would never know. Her mother would weep with her for the child none of them had wanted. She could feel it now, her mother’s cool, bony fingers stroking her hair, absent-mindedly tugging loose any knots.
Daniel had never looked for Leo’s mother. He merely found a new woman — there were always new women these days, in places like this. Maybe Denise would be the one. She wanted a baby, and if Daniel could give up the smack, he would be better than Cargill. He almost had a Ph.D.
There was no time to unpack. Any moment now, she would hear Daniel’s feet on the stairs, their elevator broken now these past three months. She had to get to the back entrance before he got to the front — before they might encounter one another in the hall. She groped inside her bag, grasping the porcelain doll by the hair and tossing it onto the floor with a louder thud than she intended — she thought she heard a crack. But there was no time now, no time to check, to see if her parting second-hand gift remained intact. Her feet were already racing down the stairs by the time the baby, its ears always unnaturally attuned to sound, heard the slam of the door and began to howl.