Things You Should Know Read online

  “Do these bites on your head hurt?” one of the residents asks.

  “What bites?”

  “Let’s clean them, put some antibiotic on, and make sure she’s up to date on tetanus,” the doctor says. “Get some antibiotics on board just be to sure, you never know what was in that water.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Stonybrook,” the resident says as though that means something.

  “Did someone say something about a swan?” she asks.

  They don’t answer.

  Her grandmother is the first one who comes to see her. Ninety-seven years old, she gets her cleaning lady to drive her over.

  “Your parents are in Italy, we haven’t been able to reach them. The doctor says you’re very lucky. You’re neurologically intact.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “We’ll sue the pants off them—don’t worry.”

  “Did anything happen to him?”

  “Broke a bone in his foot.”

  “I’m assuming he knows the wedding is off.”

  “If he doesn’t, someone will tell him.”

  “Does that come off for bathing?” her grandmother points at the plastic vest.

  “No. It’s all bolted together.”

  “Well, that’s what perfume was invented for.”

  Her girlfriends come in groups.

  “We were fast asleep.”

  “We heard the sirens.”

  “I thought something exploded.”

  “He broke a bone in his foot?” she asks.

  “His toe.”

  There is silence.

  “You made the papers,” someone says.

  In the late afternoon, when she’s alone, the innkeeper arrives.

  “I saw it happen, I water the flowers at night right before bed. I was outside and saw your car at the light. Your fellow had the strangest expression on his face. The car surged forward, between the trees, it went out over the water and then nose-down into the muck. I saw you fly over the windshield, over the water. And he was standing up, pressed against the steering wheel, one hand in the air like he was riding a bucking bronco, his foot still on the gas, engine gunning, blowing bubbles into the water. I dialed 911. I went looking for you.” He pauses. “I saw you flying through the air but I couldn’t see where you landed.”

  A human gyroscope, a twirling top. She landed at her grandmother’s house, a big old beach house on the block leading down to the ocean. She landed back in time, in the house of her youth. She sat on the porch, propped up in a wicker chair. Her grandmother read her stories of adventure and discovery. At night, when she was supposed to be sleeping, her mind wandered, daydreaming. She dreamt of a farmhouse by the water, of a small child hiding behind her skirt, a dog barking.

  It was a summer in exile; off the party lists. No one knew which side to be on, there was talk of a lawsuit, “too ugly for summer,” friends told her.

  “To hell with them,” her grandmother said. “I never liked any of them, their parents, or their grandparents. You’re a young woman, you have your own life, what do you need to be married for? Enjoy your freedom. I never would have married if I could have gotten out of it.” She leaned forward. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that.”

  At ninety-seven her grandmother set her free. At the end of the season her parents came home from Italy. “Pretend it never happened,” her mother said. “Put yourself out there and in no time you’ll meet someone new.”

  In the morning, she goes back to the beach, her hair smells of salt, her skin tastes of the sea, the scent of sex is on her, a sweet funk, a mixed drink, her and him and her, rising up, blending.

  She goes back down to the beach, proud, walking like she’s got a good little secret. As soon as she sees him, she blushes.

  He doesn’t know she is there, he doesn’t know who she is, and what would he think if he knew?

  She watches as he squirts white lotion from a tube, filling his hand with it, rubbing the hand over his chest, his belly, up and down his arms, over his neck and face, coating himself. He lubricates himself with lotion and then shimmies up the ladder and settles into the chair—on guard.

  If he knew, would he think she was a crook, stealing him without his knowledge, or would he think it was nice to be desired, had from this strange distance?

  Another boy, older, walks barefoot down the warm boards of the bathhouse, his feet moving fast and high, as if dancing on hot coals. She stays through the morning. He is not the only one, there are others. It is a constant low-key sex play, an ever-changing tableau.

  This year they have new suits, their standard Speedos replaced with baggy red trunks. Beneath their trunks, they are naked, cocksure, tempting, threatening. It is always right there, the bulge, enjoying the rub of the fabric, the shrinking chill of the sea.

  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 n
ever 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 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.

  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.