Things You Should Know Read online

  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.

  “All pregnancies end in birth,” the instructor says, holding up the knitted uterus.

  Leaving the hospital, she runs into the cop coming out of the emergency room.

  “You all right?” she asks.

  “Stepped on a rusty nail and had to get a tetanus shot.” He rubs his arm. “So, how about that coffee?”

  “Absolutely, before the end of summer,” she says, getting into her car.

  She is a woman waiting for her life to begin. She waits, counting the days. Her breasts are sore, full, like when they were first budding. She waits, thinking something is happening, and then it is not. There is a stain in her underwear, faint, light, like smoke, and overnight she begins to bleed. She bleeds thick, old blood, like rust. She bleeds bright red blood, like a gunshot wound. She bleeds heavily. She feels herself, hollow, fallow, failed. And bleeding, she mourns all that has not happened, all that will never happen. She mourns the boys, the men, the fiancé, her grandmother, the failings of her family, and her own peculiar shortcomings that have put her in this position.

  She becomes all the more determined to try again. She counts the days, keeps her temperature charts and watches her men.

  She will try harder, making sure that on the two most viable days she gets at least two doses—no such thing as too much. She continues to prepare. August, high tide, peak of the season. The local newspapers are thick with record numbers of deer jumping in front of cars, a drowning on an unprotected beach, shark spottings. The back pages are filled with pictures of social events: the annual hospital gala, the museum gala, the celebrity tennis match, benefit polo, golf tournaments, the horse show. This summer’s scandal involves a man who tried to get into “the” country club, was loudly rejected, and then showed up at the front door every day waiting for someone to sign him in as their guest.

  She makes a coffee date with the cop. At the last minute he calls to cancel.

  “They’ve got me on overtime. Can I get a rain check?”

  “Yes,” she says, “but it’s not raining.”

  She goes on with her rounds, her anthropological education. She gets bolder. Out of curiosity she goes to the other beach, the one she has always heard about, notorious for late-night activity.

  There are men in the dunes, men who tell their wives that they’re running out for milk, or a pack of cigarettes, and find themselves prowling, looking for relief. With her night-vision glasses she can see it all quite clearly; rough, animalistic, horrifying and erotic—pure pornography.

  A Planned Parenthood vigilante, throughout her cycle, she continues distributing the condom supply. She wants to keep them in the habit; she wants them to practice safe sex. She tracks her boys; she has to keep up, to know their rhythms and routines. She has to know where to find them when the moment is right. She adds a new one to her list, a sleeper who’s come into his own over the course of the summer—Travis. An exceptional swimmer, it is Travis who goes into the undertow like a fish. He puts his fins on, walks backward into the water and takes off.

  Every morning he is in the water, swimming miles of laps back and forth, up and down—the ocean is his Olympic sized pool. Sometimes she swims with him. She puts herself in the water where he is; she feels her body gliding near his. She swims a quarter mile, a half mile, moving with the current. She feels the sting of the salt in her eyes, strings of seaweed like fringe hanging off her ankles, the tug of the riptide. She swims not thinking she could be carried out to sea but that she is a mermaid and this is her habitat. She swims to the next lifeguard stand, gets out, and walks back, having perfected walking on sand, keeping her feet light, barely making a mark.

  It is nearly the end of summer. She has been taking her temperature, peeing on sticks, waiting for the surge that tells her she’s ripe, ready.

  Late afternoon at Main Beach, her boys assemble to be photographed for the town Christmas card. They pile onto the stand, wearing red Santa hats, sucking in their stomachs, flexing their muscles. On cue they smile. She stands behind the official photographer and, with her own camera, clicks.

  Does it matter to her which of them is the father of her child, whose sperm succeeds? She likes the unknowing, the possibility that it could be any one of a number of them, and then sometimes she thinks she wants it to be him, the boy with the hieroglyph, with the baby-sitter/waitress girlfriend—he strikes her as the most stable, most sincere.

  Soon they will go back to school and the summer romance will end. They will leave and she will stay on.

  The day the stick turns positive, she makes her rounds.

  Travis has a new girlfriend, a blonde who works at the snack bar. She finds them on the other side of town by the marina. They make out for more than forty minutes before Travis leads her to a platform at the end of the dock. When they are done, they dive into the water for a quick swim and she finds herself checking her watch, worrying that the sperm is getting cold. When they leave she has trouble locating the condom, finally finding it, dangling from a nail on one of the pilings almost as though he knew and left it for her. Five cc—a very good shot.

  She inseminates herself, lying back in the car, knees hooked over the steering wheel, blanket over her for warmth. It is cooler in the evenings now; she has a layer of long underwear on under her sex outfit, and a spare blanket in the car. The boys and girls all wear sweatshirts declaring their intentions, preferences, fantasies: Dartmouth, Tufts, SUNY, Princeton, Hobart, Columbia, NYU.

  She lies back, looking up at the sky; there is a full moon, a thousand stars, Orion, Taurus, the Big Dipper. She lies waiting and then moves on. The wind is starting to blow. At the end of every summer there is always a storm, a violent closing out of the season, it charges through literally changing the air—the day it passes, fall begins.

  Her favorite couple is hidden in a curve of dune. They are already at it when she arrives. Leaving the night-vision glasses in the car, she travels by moonlight with just her fanny pack. The wind is hurling sand across the dune; the surf crashes unrelentingly. They do it fast, now practiced, they do it seriously, knowing this will be one of the last times, they do it and then they run for cover.

  The condom is still warm when she finds it. She holds it between her teeth and, using both hands, scoops the sand, molding it into a mound that will hold her hips up high. She inseminates herself lying in the spot where they had lain. She inseminates, listening to the pounding of the waves, the sea ahead of the storm, watching moonlight shimmering across the water.

  A phosphorescent dream: she thinks she feels it, she thinks she knows the exact moment it happens; the sperm and the egg finding each other, penetrating, exploding, dividing, floating, implanting, multiplying. She imagines a sea horse, a small, curled thing, primitive, growing, buds of hands—fists clenched, a translucent head, eyes bulging. She feels it digging in, feeding, becoming human. She wakes up hungry, ready. In May she will meet her, a little girl, just in time for summer—Georgica.

  REMEDY

  It is about wanting and need, wanting and need—a peculiar, desperate kind of need, needing to get what you never got, wanting it still, wanting it all the more, nonetheless. It is about a profound desire for connection. It is about how much we don’t know, how much we can’t say, what we don’t understand. It is about how unfamiliar even the familiar can become.

  It is about holding one’s breath, holding the breath until you are blue in the face, holding the breath to threaten, to dare, to say if you do not give me what I want, I will stop breathing. It is about holding back, withholding. It is about being stuck. It is about panic. It is about realizing you are in over your head, s
omething’s got to give. It is about things falling apart. It is about fracture.

  It is afternoon, just after lunch. She starts dialing. She dials, knowing no one is home. Her mother, retired, remains a worker, always out, doing, running. Her father is busy as well, taking classes, volunteering. She dials as a kind of nervous tic and then, when she can’t get the call to go through, she dials more frantically as though in a nightmare; calling for help, screaming and no one hears, picking up to find the line is dead. She dials, forgetting the new area code.

  “The area code for the number you’re calling has changed. The new area code is 343. Please redial the number using the new area code.”

  She dials again, unsure of the last four digits of her calling card.

  “The personal identification number you entered is incorrect. Please reenter the last four digits of your calling card.”

  She reenters.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She is cut off.

  She dials once more—if it doesn’t work, she is going to dial 0 and have an operator place the call, she is going to dial 911 and tell them it is an emergency, somebody must do something. She dials 9 for an outside line and then she dials the number straight through, letting the office pay for the call—fuck it. The new area code feels odd on her fingers. She hates change, she absolutely hates change.

  And then the phone is ringing, and on the second ring the answering machine picks up, and there is her mother’s voice, distant, formal—the outgoing announcement of a generation that has never gotten used to the answering machine.

  She hangs up without leaving a message.

  She checks her schedule. There is a three o’clock meeting—the subject: pain relief.

  She has not spoken to Steve today. That part of their relationship, calls during the day, is over. There used to be phone calls as soon as he walked out of the apartment, sometimes from the elevator going down, “I’m in the elevator, the neighbors are surrounding me, pick up the phone.” A call when he got to the office, “Just checking in,” after lunch, “I shouldn’t have had the wine,” in the late afternoon, “I’ll be finished early,” and then again before leaving, “What do you want to do about dinner?”

  Now, they can’t talk. Every conversation, every attempt turns into a fight. She can’t say the right thing, he can’t do the right thing, they hate each other—all the more for the disappointment. There is no negotiation, no interest in repair, only anger and inertia.

  “It’s not my fault,” he says.

  “If there’s such a thing as fault—it’s half your fault.”

  She hurries to prepare for the meeting, the launch of a combination acetaminophen/homeopathic preparation (Tylenol and Rescue Remedy)—Products for Modern Living, a pill for all your problems.

  Wendy, the shared assistant, stops her as she’s going down the hall. “I couldn’t get you a conference room for a whole hour, so I got you two halves.”

  “Two halves of a conference room?”

  “From three to three-thirty you’re in two, and from three-thirty until four you’re in six.”

  “Halfway through, we have to change rooms? That’s crazy.”

  Wendy shrugs.

  “It’s not just about any headache,” she says, sitting down with the client. “It’s your headache. It’s the sense that you’re about to explode. Your head is pounding, the boss is droning on in the background, kids are screaming, you need relief and you need it fast.”

  The client nods.

  “It’s the classic headache ad—pumped up, there’s throbbing and there’s volume and pressure.”

  “Modern life is very stressful,” the client says, happily counting the bucks.

  “There’s the emergency room doctor/trauma surgeon, the voice of authority. ‘As a doctor at a leading trauma hospital, I know about pain, I know about stress, and I know how quickly I need to feel better.’ The doctor moves through the emergency room—all kinds of horrible things are happening in the background. ‘A combination of acetaminophen and a homeopathic supplement, Products for Modern Living offers safe, effective relief.’ She picks up a patient’s chart and makes a note. ‘Sometimes what’s old is what’s new.’”

  “I like it. It’s fresh and familiar,” the client says.

  “Let’s move from here into conference room six and we’ll review the rest of our campaign,” she says, seamlessly moving her team down the hall.

  Later, she passes Wendy’s desk; Wendy is obsessively dipping cookies into a container of orange juice.

  “Are you okay?”

  Wendy puts out her hands, they’re shaking. “Low blood sugar. I spent from eight-thirty until three trying to get the damned computer to print. I called Information Services, they said they could come tomorrow, but the proposal had to go out today. Never mind. I did it. I got it done.” She plunges a cookie into the juice.

  She hands Wendy a sample of the remedy. “Try it,” she says. “Call it market research and bill them for an extra twenty-five hundred bucks.”

  Again she dials. The phone rings and rings, maybe her mother is there, maybe she is on the other line. Maybe it is her father—her father always ignores the call-waiting, he doesn’t know what call-waiting is.

  “Didn’t you hear me beeping? That was me trying to call you.”

  “Is that what that was? I was on the line, talking to a man about something.”

  She worries that one day she will call and no one will answer—one day she will call and they won’t be there anymore.

  She remembers dialing her grandmother’s number just after her grandmother died. She called just as she had always done. The number rang and rang and somehow she didn’t lose hope that her grandmother would find her way to the phone. She thought it might take longer, but she expected her grandmother would answer. And then one day there was a recorded voice, “The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected. If you need further assistance please hang up and dial the operator.”

  She hangs up. Six months after her grandmother died, she went to her grandmother’s house and parked outside the front door. The plants that used to be on the sill of the kitchen window were gone. The light in the living room, always on, was off. She walked around back and peered through the sliding glass door. The house was filled with different furniture; different pictures of different grandchildren rested on the mantel.

  “Can I help you?” Mr. Silver, the old man next door asked, as though he’d never seen her before.

  “Just looking,” she said and walked away.

  It is getting dark: five-twenty-two. If she hurried she could take the six o’clock Metroliner, she could be in Washington by eight. She wants to go home. It has been coming upon her for days. Almost like coming down with a cold, she has been coming down with the urgent need to go home, to sit at her place at the kitchen table, to look out her bedroom window at the trees she saw at one, at twelve, at twenty. She needs something, she can’t say exactly what. She keeps brushing it off, hoping it will pass, and then it overwhelms her.

  Again, she dials. A man answers. She hangs up and tries again, more carefully, looking at the numbers. Again, the unfamiliar man answers.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Wrong number.”

  Again, she tries again.

  “May I help you?” he says.

  “I keep thinking I’m calling home, I know this number, and yet you answer. Sorry. I’ll check the number and try again.”

  She dials.

  “Hello?” the man says. “Hello, hello?”

  She says nothing.

  He waits and then hangs up.

  She puts on her coat and leaves the office. If she had reached her mother she might have felt good enough to go to the gym or to go shopping. But what started as a nervous tic has become something more, she is all the more uncomfortable, she goes directly to the apartment.

  There is a message from Steve.

  “Sorry we didn’t talk. I meant to call earlier but things got crazy. Tonight
’s the game. I’ll be home late.”

  The game. She forgot.

  She takes off her coat and pours herself a glass of wine.

  Steve is at the game with his best friend, Bill. Bill is forty-three, never married. Bill won’t keep anything perishable in his apartment and has no plants because it’s too much responsibility. When he’s bored he drones “Next,” demanding a change of subject. Inexplicably, it is Bill whom Steve turns to for advice.

  Again, she dials.

  “Who are you trying to reach?” the man asks. This time, no hello.

  Without saying anything, she hangs up.

  She orders Chinese. She calls her brother in California; she gets his machine. “When did you last talk to Mom and Dad? Were they okay? Did something happen to their phone? Call me.”

  By ten, she is beginning to imagine horrible things, accidents. She is dialing and dialing. Where are they? At seventy-six and eighty-three, how far can they have gotten?

  She remembers New Year’s Eves when she was young, when she was home eating Ruffles with Ridges and California Dip, watching New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and waiting.

  Eleven-fifty-nine, the countdown, sixty seconds away from a new year; three, two, one. The ball drops. The crowd goes crazy.

  “Happy New Year from Times Square in New York. Look and listen as America welcomes in 1973.” She drinks her fizzy cider and waits. Ten minutes later the phone rings.

  “Happy New Year, sweetie,” her mother says. “We’re having a wonderful time. Mrs. Griswald is just about to serve dessert and then we’ll be home. It’s going to be a good year.”

  She remembers checking the clock—twelve-twenty. At one, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve segued into the late, late movie and she began to wonder. At one-thirty wonder turned to worry. At quarter of two she was picturing her parents’ car in a ditch by the side of the road. At two-twenty she wondered if it was too late to call the Griswalds and ask when they’d left. She was twelve years old and powerless. By two-forty, when she heard their key in the door, she was livid. She slammed the door to her room and turned off the light.