Things You Should Know Read online

  A white car pulls into the lot. A girl gets out. The light from the parking lot, combined with the humidity of the sea, fills the air with a humid glow that surrounds them like clouds. They stand, two angelic figures caught in her crosshairs. They walk hand in hand down to the beach. She trails after them, keeping a safe distance.

  The night-vision glasses, enormously helpful, were not part of her original scenario. She bought them last weekend at a yard sale, at the home of a retired colonel. “They were mine, that’s the original box,” the colonel’s son said, coming up behind her. “My father gave them to me for Christmas, they were crazy expensive. I think he wanted them for himself.”

  “Is there some way I can try them?”

  He led her into his basement, pulling the door closed behind them. “I hope I’m not frightening you.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “We unwrapped on Christmas Eve, my father turned off all the lights and made me try. I remember looking at the Christmas tree, weaving around the room, watching the lights move and then tripping, going down hard, and starting the new year with two black eyes like a raccoon.”

  “May I?”

  He handed her the glasses, she reached out, feeling her way forward, their hands bumped. There was something terrifying about this unfamiliar dark; she stared at the glowing fish tank for comfort.

  “The ON button is between the eyes.” She flipped them on and suddenly she saw everything—ice skates, an old rowing machine, odd military memorabilia, a leaf blower, hammers and saws hanging from pegs. She saw everything and thought that in a minute she was going to see something extra, something she shouldn’t see, a body in a clear plastic bag, slumped in the corner, a head on a stick, something unforgivably horrible. Everything had the eerie neon green of a horror movie, of information captured surreptitiously.

  “If you’re interested I’d be happy to throw in a bayonet and a helmet,” he said, handing her one of each.

  The boy and his girl are on the sand, making out. There is something delicate, tentative, in how they approach each other. Kissing and then pulling back, checking to see if it’s okay, discovering how it feels, a tongue in the mouth, a hand on the breast, the press of a cock against the thigh.

  He lifts her shirt, exposing an old-fashioned white bra. She unhooks it for him. Her breasts are surprisingly large, his hands are on them, not entirely sure what one does, his lack of skill endearing.

  She feels the urgency of their desire. Without warning she finds herself excited.

  He takes his sweatshirt off and lays it on the sand. They are one atop the other. She imagines the smell of him, suntan lotion, sweat, and sand, she imagines the smell of her—guacamole, fried onions, barbecue, stale cologne. She works either in a local restaurant or as a baby-sitter: formula, vomit, sour milk, stale cologne.

  He rises for a minute, unzips his pants. His erection, long and lean, throbs in the moonlight. The girl takes it in her mouth. The boy kneels frozen, paralyzed by sensation, while the girl bobs up and down, like one of those trick birds drinking from a water glass.

  She becomes alarmed, hopes they don’t keep at it, not wanting to waste her shot.

  “The condom, put on the condom,” she is thinking out loud.

  And then, finally, he pulls away, falls back on the sand, reaches into his pocket, locating it. He has trouble rolling it on—the girl helps. And then the girl is upon him, riding him, her bazoombas bouncing, floating like dirigibles. The boy lies back flattened, devastated, his arms straight up, reaching.

  As soon as the condom is on, she feels her body opening. As soon as the girl is upon him, she is upon herself, warming to the touch. She wants to be ready. She is watching them and working herself. This is better than anything, more romantic, more relaxing than actually doing it with someone.

  It ends abruptly. When they are done they are embarrassed, overwhelmed, suddenly strangers. They scramble for their clothing, hurry to the car, and are gone—into the night.

  She waits until the coast is clear and then rushes toward the spot, finds it, and switches on her other light, a head-mounted work light, like a miner’s lamp. She plucks the condom from the sand, holding the latex sheath of lust, of desire, carefully. The contents have not spilled, that’s the good news, and he has performed well—the tip is full, she figures it’s three or four cc. Working quickly, she pulls a syringe—no needle—from her fanny pack and lowers it into the condom. She has practiced this procedure at home using lubricated Trojans and a combination of mayonnaise and Palmolive dish detergent. With one hand, she pulls back on the plunger, sucking it up. Holding the syringe upright, capping it, taking care not to lose any, she turns off her lights and makes a bee-line back up the beach to her car.

  She has tilted the driver’s seat back as far as it goes, and put a small pillow at the head end for her neck—she always has to be careful of the neck.

  She gets into the car and puts herself in position, lying back, feet on the dash, hips tilted high. She is upside down like an astronaut prepared to launch, a modified yoga inversion, a sort of shoulder stand, more pillows under her hips, lifting her. The steering wheel helps hold her in place.

  She is wearing sex pants. She has taken a seam ripper and opened the crotch, making a convenient yet private entry. She slips the syringe through the hole. When she’s in as far as she can go, she pushes the plunger down—blastoff.

  Closing her eyes, she imagines the sperm, stunned, drunken, in a whirl, ejaculated from his body into the condom and then out of the condom into her, swimming all the while. She imagines herself as part of their romance.

  After a few minutes, she takes a sponge—wrapped in plastic, tied with a string—and pushes it in holding the sperm against her cervix.

  Meditation. Sperm swimming, beach sperm, tadpole sperm, baby-whale sperm, boy sperm, millions of sperm. Sperm and egg. The egg launching, meeting the sperm in the fallopian tube, like the boy and girl meeting in the parking lot, coupling, traveling together, dividing, replicating, digging in, implanting.

  She has been there about five minutes when there is a knock at the window, the beam of a flashlight looking in. She can’t put down the window, because the ignition is off, she doesn’t want to sit up, because it will ruin everything—she uses her left hand to open the car door.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you, but you can’t sleep here,” the police officer says.

  “I’m not sleeping, I’m resting.”

  The officer sees the pillows, he sees the soft collar around her neck—under the dim glow of the interior light, he sees her.

  “Oh,” he says. “It’s you, the girl from last summer, the girl with the halo.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Wow. It’s good to see you up and around. Are you up and around? Is everything all right?”

  “Fine,” she says. “But I have these moments where I just have to lie down right then and there.”

  “Do you need anything? I have a blanket in the back of the car.”

  “I’ll be all right, thank you.”

  He hangs around, standing just inside the car door, hands on his hips. “I was one of the first ones at the scene of the accident,” he says. “I closed down the road when they took you over to the church—it was me with the flares who directed the helicopter in.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “I was worried you were a goner. People said they saw you fly through the air like a cannonball. They said they’d never seen anything like it.”

  “Umm,” she says.

  “I heard you postponed the wedding,” he says.

  “Canceled it.”

  “I can understand, given the circumstances.”

  She is waiting for him to leave.

  “So, when you get like that, how long do you stay upside down?”

  “About a half hour,” she says.

  “And how long has it been?”

  “I’d say about fifteen minutes.”

>   “Would you like to get a cup of coffee when you’re done?”

  “Aren’t you on duty?”

  “I could say I was escorting you home.”

  “Not tonight, but thanks.”

  “Some other time?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sorry to hear about your grandmother—I read the obituary.”

  She nods. A couple of months ago, just after her ninety-eighth birthday, her grandmother died in her sleep—as graceful as it gets.

  “That’s a lot for one year—an accident, a canceled wedding, your grandmother passing.”

  “It is a lot,” she says.

  “You a birder?” he asks. “I see you’ve got binocs in the back seat.”

  “Always on the lookout,” she says.

  In a way she could see going for coffee, she could see marrying the local cop. He’s not like a real cop, not someone you’re going to worry isn’t going to make it home at night. Out here she’d worry that he’d do something stupid—scurry up a telephone pole for a stuck cat.

  He’s still standing in the door.

  “I guess I’d better go,” he says, moving to close the car door. “I don’t want to wear your battery down.” He points at the interior light.

  “Thanks again,” she says.

  “See you,” he says, closing the door. He taps on the glass. “Drive carefully,” he says.

  She stays the way she is for a while longer and then pulls the pillows out from under, carefully unfolds herself, brings the seat back up, and starts the engine.

  She drives home past the pond, there is no escaping it.

  He was drunk. After a party he was always drunk.

  “I’m drunk,” he’d say going back for another.

  “I’m drunk,” he’d say when they’d said their good-byes and were walking down the gravel driveway in the dark.

  “I’ll drive,” she’d say.

  “It’s my car,” he’d say.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Not really, I’m faking it.”

  An old Mercedes convertible. It should have been perfect, riding home with the top down in the night air, taken by the sounds of frogs, the crickets, Miles Davis on the radio, a million stars overhead, the stripe of the Milky Way, no longer worrying what the wind was doing to her hair—the party over.

  It should have been perfect, but the minute they were alone there was tension. She disappeared, mentally, slipping back into the party, the clinking of glasses, bare-armed, bare-backed women, men sporty and tan, having gotten up early and taken the kids out for doughnuts, having spent the afternoon in action; tennis, golf, sailing, having had a nice long hot shower and a drink as they dressed for evening.

  “Looking forward to planning a wedding?” one of the women had asked.

  “No.” She had no interest in planning a wedding. She was expected to marry him, but the more time that passed, the more skittish they both became, the more she was beginning to think a wedding was not a good idea. She became angry that she’d lost time, that she’d run out of time, that her choices were becoming increasingly limited. She had dated good men, bad men, the right men at the wrong time, the wrong men a lot of the time.

  And the more time that passed, the more bitter he became, the more he wanted to go back in time, the more he craved his lost youth.

  “Let’s stay out,” he’d say to friends after a party.

  “Can’t. We’ve got to get the sitter home.”

  “What’s the point of having a baby-sitter if you’re still completely tied down?”

  “It’s late,” they’d say.

  “It’s early, it’s very early,” he’d say.

  And soon there was nothing left to say.

  “You’re all so boring,” he’d say, which didn’t leave anyone feeling good about anything.

  “Good night,” they’d say.

  He drove, the engine purred. They passed houses, lit for night, front porch lights on, upstairs bathroom light on, reading light on. He drove and she kept a lookout, fixed on the edges of the road, waiting to catch the eyes of an animal about to dash, the shadow of a deer about to jump.

  When he got drunk, he’d start looking for a fight. If there wasn’t another man around to wrestle with he’d turn on her.

  “How can you talk incessantly all night and then the minute we’re in the car you have nothing to say?”

  “I had nothing to say all night either,” she said.

  “Such a fucking depressive—what’s wrong with you?”

  He accelerated.

  “I’m not going to fight with you,” she said.

  “You’re the kind of person who thinks she’s always right,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  Coming into town the light was green. A narrow road, framed by hundred-year-old trees, a big white house on the left, an inn across the way, the pond where in winter ice-skaters turned pirouettes, the cemetery on the far side, the old windmill, the Episcopal church, all of it deeply picturesque.

  Green light, go. Coming around the corner, he seemed to speed up rather than slow down, he seemed to press his foot harder into the gas. They turned the corner. She could tell they weren’t going to make it. She looked at him to see if he had the wheel in hand, if he had any idea what he was doing, if he thought it was a joke. And then as they picked up more speed, as they slipped off the road, between two trees, over the embankment, she looked away.

  The car stopped and her body continued on.

  She remembers flying as if on a magic carpet, flying the way you might dream it, flying over water—sudden, surprising, and not entirely unpleasant.

  She remembers thinking she might fly forever, all the way home.

  She remembers thinking to cover her head, remembers they are by a cemetery.

  She remembers telling herself—This is the last time.

  She remembers when they went canoeing on the pond. A swan came charging toward the boat like a torpedo, like a hovercraft, skimming the surface, gaining on them. At first they thought it was funny and then it wasn’t.

  “Should I swing my paddle at him? Should I try and hit him on the head? Should I break his fucking neck? What should I do?” he kept asking, all the while leaving her at the front of the boat, paddling furiously, left, right, left, right.

  Now, something is pecking at her, biting her.

  There is a sharp smell like ammonia, like smelling salts.

  She remembers her body not attached to anything.

  “Can you hear us?”

  “Can someone get the swans out of here?”

  Splashing. People walking in water. A lot of commotion.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Don’t try to move. Don’t move anything. Let us do all the work.”

  She remembers a lot of questions, time passing very slowly. She remembers the birds, a church, the leaf of a tree, the night sky, red lights, white lights in her eyes. She thinks she screamed. She meant to scream. She doesn’t know if she can make any noise.

  “What is your name?”

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Can you feel this?”

  “We’re going to give you some oxygen.”

  “We’re going to set up an IV, there may be a little stick.”

  “Do these bites on your head hurt?”

  “Follow this light with your eyes.”

  “Look at me. Can you look at me?”

  He turns away. “We’re going to need a medevac helicopter. We’re going to need to land on that churchyard up there. We’re going to need her stable, in a hard collar and on a board. I think we may have a broken neck.”

  She thinks they are talking about a swan, a swan has been injured.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” they say, pinching her awake. “Stay with us.”

  And then she is flying again. She remembers nothing. She remembers only what they told her.

  “You’re very lucky. You could have been decapitated or paralyzed forever.”


  She is in a hospital far away.

  “You have a facet dislocation, five over six—in essence, a broken neck. We’re going to put you in a halo and a jacket. You’ll be up and around in no time.”

  The doctor smiles down at her. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She can’t nod. She tries to but nothing happens. “Yes,” she says. “You think I’m very lucky.”

  In the operating room, the interns and residents swab four points on her head. “Have you ever done this before?” they ask each other.

  “I’ve watched.”

  “We’re going to logroll you,” the doctor tells her. And they do. “Get the raised part at the back of the skull and the front positioning pin lined up over the bridge of the nose, approximately seven centimeters over the eyebrows with equal distance between the head and the halo all the way around.”

  “How are your fingers? Can you move your fingers?”

  She can.

  “Good. Now wiggle your toes.”

  “You don’t want it too high, it pitches the head back so she just sees sky, and you don’t want it too low because then she’s looking at her shoes,” the doctor says. He seems to know what he is talking about.

  “Feel my finger on your cheek—sharp or dull?”

  “Sharp.”

  “Let’s simultaneously tighten one anterior and its diagonal opposite posterior.”

  “Thanks. Now pass me the wrench.”

  “Close your eyes, please.”

  She doesn’t know if they’re talking to her or someone else. Someone looks directly down at her. “Time to close your eyes.”

  She is bolted into a metal halo, which is then bolted into a plastic vest, all of it like the scaffolding around a building, like the Statue of Liberty undergoing renovations. When they are done and sit her upright—she almost faints.

  “Perfectly normal,” the doctor says. “Fainting. Dizziness.” He taps her vest—knock, knock.

  “What am I made out of?”

  “Space-age materials. In the old days we would have wrapped you in a plaster cast. Imagine how comfy that was. I assume you didn’t have your seatbelt on?”