Zoetrope: All-Story Extra - Unborn by Laura Joyce

Here is what you do: you answer the telephone because it won't stop ringing. You're cooking dinner, one of those multi-task affairs with three burners going at once. You don't usually do this; God knows they're not grateful. They spit it out and whine and complain, but you feel like a better mother if you do this every now and then. By the end of dinner you want to throw your plate against the wall and sit, arms folded, watching the food slide brokenly down the wallpaper, the same wallpaper you put up so that your family, the family that would live in a tent and not notice, will be surrounded by something homey, something warm. You answer the telephone because it is there and it is making noise and it needs to be answered, like almost everything in your life.

Who can explain the adoration, the simple rush of love you feel for your friend? She's nothing like you. She is irresponsible, loud. She wears black, has breast implants and favors low-cut shirts that emphasize the swell of tanning-booth-browned cleavage. She is, right now, removing a large silver earring in order to get the phone closer to her ear; you've seen her do this so many times that you know what is making the metallic sound against the receiver. She drops men like Kleenex, an ability you've often longed for, since you keep men well past their usefulness. In your life men are like expired food crowded inside of your refrigerator; if you don't look at the purple printed dates, you can almost convince yourself you're well-stocked. You think in the constant, careful terms of someone who must supply the terminally hungry.

But lives . . . hearts are nickel candy to Meg: torn open in the store, unpaid for; a favorite for a week, a month, and left behind like so much trash, detritus, damaged goods. This is Meg's way, not yours, and she is somehow still charming despite it. Trying to analyze your affection for her leaves you confused, as if her mindlessness is contagious. Even thinking about her dulls the mind. You give up.

"I have a huge favor to ask," she says, but you know that Meg has no concept of size or cost; she never pays. From where you stand, all of Meg's favors are huge. They are often outlandish; for Meg you find yourself spying on men at 3 a.m. or calling a phone number and pretending to be someone you're not. Her favors often cost you money, money you don't have; they take you to strange places. For a moment, she beats around the bush; the stalling puts you on notice that this favor is going to cost you more dearly than most.

"Ah," you say when she is finally out with it. "Ah," as if someone is looking down your throat and right into your guts, which are feeling punched-out with the dinner that borders on hysteria at this point in the preparations, with her request, with the things you think you might feel tomorrow when you grant this favor. Of course, you will do this for her; this is never in question for either of you. She knew this, calling, and you knew it before she ever told you where or how you would be spending your day. Meg is everything you are not, light, careless, and you suffer much to breathe her in.

Arrangements made, you repeat her words, saying you love her. This is the way your phone conversations always end with Meg. It has taken you a year, maybe more, to comfortably reciprocate these words - if this can even be called comfort, the pleased, awkward way you mutter "I love you." Lately you've gotten braver about saying it because you believe her, finally. You have stopped hearing her words as the same ones she cries out gleefully to handsome men in dark, pulsing nightclubs. This is different; these are light-of-day words.

Dinner comes together in your command: things steam, things bubble, the table looks proud. No matter that your children scream because you can't get their food onto their plates and cut up fast enough while your husband sits in his chair like some caricature from the Fifties, waiting to be served. You glare out of habit, not bothering to direct the glare at him. You are busy and efficient, and don't waste energy on a look just for him. You toss chicken on his plate; it slides as it lands and leaves a smear of red sauce on white china, blood on sheets.

Loud clamoring serves as your dinner music: clattering spoons hit the floor; plastic cups click on the scarred wooden tabletop; requests for more, always more, come from your right elbow. This is where your good eater insists on sitting: he intuitively knows the position to take in order to ensure a steady stream of food. This child, the indulged youngest, won't let your husband touch him and this, you think wryly, you understand. "Mommy First" is the way he makes his preference known. It is understood that he will scream mercilessly if anyone but you cares for him.

After dinner, after bath time, after the stories and the songs and the kisses that are the sweetest part of your life, after the numbing routine of the evening, every evening, you take coffee outside, hoping your husband won't follow you. You have nothing to say to him and he is no more than a fly at your wrist, a constant reminder that you have lost control of your environment, that you have somehow ended up with a man who wants nothing more than to feed off you. He is like those dependent creatures -- you can't think of the simple word, suddenly -- that everyone studies in junior high biology.

Parasites. You smile briefly at your ability to recall the unimportant. Your smile is fleeting, tight, something you can't quite afford, and relief breezes over you. In the burying minutiae of your life, you have worried about your memory burning out. Why not, though, when so much else has disappeared, even things you thought were permanent? Some gray part of your mind coughs up a long-ago test answer. Parasite: any organism living on or in another and obtaining its nutrients from the host without contributing anything in return. You turn it into a game. In most cases, parasites damage their host. Parasites for two hundred, Alex. Temporary parasites spend some time with their host but are otherwise free-living. Your mind cartwheels and you know that anyone seeing your thoughts would believe that you are mad.

You are imagining parasites backing out of a driveway, suitcases piled in the back of a tiny car, off to stay a week with another host, when your own personal parasite appears -- suddenly your amusement dead-ends; you feel mean and then instantly bone-tired. For a long moment he watches you through the glass door, but he sees your expression, sees you have that empty look again. He leaves you to think these thoughts that are banging at your aching head for the first time in years.

It is January, 1981. January 20. You ditch school to take the Metro downtown with your friends Charlotte and Leslie. Your plan, the one your parents hear about, is to go to President Reagan's inaugural parade. The truth, though, is that the three of you find any excuse to skip classes. This is all right, because you are smart, you are seniors, you have everything, and a day out of class isn't going to hurt anyone. It is supposed to be exciting: all those flags, the horses two-stepping, the brassy music, but you are blocks away from the Capitol. After an hour of listening to the muted bands in the crowd of too-thrilled tourists, you are bored.

Somehow you end up leaving your friends, taking the train alone back to your car and then driving to your boyfriend's house. He is older, already in college and living in a rented room in a broken-down house off campus. Everything about him is new to you: his adult smell--some aftershave that men use, not boys --his Catholic shyness, his diffidence when he touches you and his guilt afterward.

He doesn't have classes that day. By mid-afternoon you are under him on the narrow bed in his room, the thin walls making both of you whisper. He is so much larger than you, but he always holds himself up by his arms, those strong arms, as he makes love to you.

"Oh, Jeez," he says. It is his favorite expression; it covers almost any feeling and can mean almost anything, and so for a moment you aren't alarmed. As if he is standing before you now, you can precisely recall the crestfallen look on his face. The fear in his eyes is burned permanently into your memory and so is the sensation of his hairless chest pressed naked against your own softness just before he lifts himself off you. You remember his coarse Nordic hair in your hands, his strong Irish jaw against your neck. Everything, everything floods back to you; your eyes are closed and if you open them he will be here now, in your backyard, in your life, his expression unbearably young and scared. You will take pity on him if he appears now, sitting beside you in the shaded evening.

But he doesn't appear, and so you follow his eyes downward and see it, see the torn opaque material, the rupture in the thin layer between the two of you and forever. Instantly you try to reassure him. Your efforts fail, and you, the great communicator, leave quickly, in silence, because he is too frightened and you are too sick to speak. You pretend that things are the same but a few weeks later when you call him at school, you clutch the results in your hand as though you'd forget them without the prompt. You hear him disappear: he becomes smoke, a genie, and your fist shoots out to lay its claim but he evaporates through the phone line, diffusing into time and sound and silence, leaving you empty-handed. You might as well be talking to no one, saying nothing. It is the first time this has happened: until now, you've sent the boys away. All these years later, though, you know what happened that day on the telephone; it was a first like any other first: the first kiss, the first time you make love, the first time a man who loves you somehow doesn't love you well enough. All firsts, scars, part of the landscape of your heart now, things which you have learned both to fear and accept.

In your newness at loving, as a foreigner to the mysteries of what is true in the dark and what remains true in the daylight, you don't understand then that there are only two things that frighten him: one is that you will have it - it, this thing -- and the other is that you will not. But now, all these years and other men later, knowing the texture, the landscape of disappointment so well, you sip your coffee and wonder what you were so afraid of when you let him change toward you, let him slip away inside of himself without protest.

Where did you learn to do that? Why?

You have to get up early to pick her up in time for the appointment. This means that he'll have to handle the children this morning, which means that you'll return home to cereal mashed into the carpet, soggy and disheartening. There will be more milky bowls than three children could possibly need for breakfast; you'll find them throughout the house. A dirty diaper will lie like an accusation on the rug, damp night clothes will be strewn everywhere, and again, there will be more clothes than children. You will wonder, perhaps amused, perhaps not, at who has been sleeping in your house, unknown.

Whatever the answer, it won't make sense to you, and you may mutter and curse as you clean or you may do the work in silence; it will depend on what is left of you after your morning with Meg. You alternate between hostility and despair so much of the time, anyway: it is unpredictable which of the two your heart will choose to wear for this occasion.

Before you return to your life, though, you will drive the mile to her house and honk once. She'll keep you waiting as she always does; you've brought a book and you'll pretend to read it while you wait, although the words will just swim past your eyes, mocking your pretenses. When she emerges from the house she'll be wearing something flashy; even today, even for this, she'll look perfect, with makeup enhancing her big, dark eyes and clothes carefully chosen to accentuate her lovely body.

You eye her carefully as she runs toward the car; you are looking for changes in her, but it's too soon, too early; there is nothing to see. She has none of that sway-backed pride in her carriage that another woman might have right now; this is nothing that she wishes to claim. She is not about to walk differently and this is hard for you to understand; you don't know if you admire her for it or dismiss her.

"You okay?" This is what you will ask, and she will nod and sigh and make some small, ambiguous noise. You will nod in return, knowing exactly what she means.

It will be a silent trip - unusual, because ordinarily you both talk non-stop. This does not surprise you, though, considering. Words seem gratuitous: you are here and she is here and where you are going speaks volumes.

He can't go with you. He is working at a new job to help pay for college. He has only been there for a few weeks when it happens, and he pleads with you that he can't risk the job by taking a day off. As it is, he begins, and his argument ends with something about asking for special treatment. You remember his logical, protesting voice -- as though logic counted -- with great clarity. You know that he is lying and you say so; you say he is a coward and would go if he really loved you. These many years later, you understand the complications, the way that nothing is as it seems at seventeen, but who could expect such understanding from you back then? Instead, you are driven there by the same friends, Charlotte and Leslie, who were with you on the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Someone, possibly you, is clutching a big stuffed bear and your friends take charge of it as a nurse leads you away into a purple-carpeted, lavender-painted hallway.

The building is nondescript with red brick facing on the front and concrete block on the sides, as if someone was too cheap to do more than create an illusion. It looks clean, though, well kept, and this reassures you, as you assume it reassures Meg. She still doesn't talk as you walk slowly inside -- last chance, you think, and your mind spins off wildly for a moment as you think of alternatives, because it's real suddenly, and you've got that feeling, that sensation, that arm-aching that you sometimes feel around babies so new that they still have that sharp-sweet acetone smell from the womb.

You stand beside a window as Meg fills out papers. It looks as if it will storm, but this is just the gray of the tinted glass playing tricks. Still, you prefer it this way, prefer the sense that the weather is somber, even dangerous, that this is a day with nothing redeeming about it, at least from here where you stand.

The appointment card says that you are supposed to be there at ten. Before you meet your friends you drive around aimlessly in your perfect little town. Everything is planned here, and even though you're only seventeen, you're feeling cynical today as you eye the trees, the flowers, the walkways and little bridges and bicycle paths. They mock you. Pulling your car into a hidden parking area -- that it is hidden is planned, too, of course -- you sit with the window open, wondering what will happen if you don't go, if you let this thing take root, become something, if you let your flat belly swell and come alive and take you over. You know you won't but you run free with the fantasy of it anyway, the possibility.

You think of your uncle, the one who adores you and lives across the country, and you imagine calling him and going to live with him until it is born. You think no farther than that. You know that he will say yes to your wild plans.

Now, looking back, you are almost sure that he would have said no -- he is, after all, finally childless, his children grown -- but you see things so differently now, of course; you have lived some, you have not always gotten what you wanted in the years that have intervened, and you even know the precise moment when the world stopped giving in to your whims.

When there is no more time to think, you drive through your perfect town and meet your friends, and there is something with the stuffed bear, some comforting ritual worked out in your absence, and you drive to the building with the purple carpet and the lavender walls, and a nurse who isn't dressed like a nurse leads you into a room and helps you into a gown and you lie down on a black-cushioned table and wait.

You kiss her on the cheek before she disappears into the back with a clipboard-carrying nurse. She looks pale now, your friend.

"It's scary," you say, although you don't know if you're sympathizing or just remembering. Either way, she nods. Yes. It's scary. She disappears around a corner and you sit down in an uncomfortable orange chair, clutching that damn, useless book that will take you nowhere; you are here and here you will stay, body, mind, all of you, except what's missing.

Ronald Fucking Reagan. This is what you mutter over and over as the doctor digs and scrapes inside of you. It hurts; it hurts more than anything you've ever felt in your protected life, despite some sort of fluid that is dripping into your veins and making everything blurry. The doctor hates his job or he hates you or both; you can't know which it is, but hate, this you know; you recognize his red fury mixing with your own crimson blood. He tells you to shut up -- his voice is tight, angry and he actually says it, says, "Shut up" -- and you cry. The nurse lets you clutch her hand, although you must be hurting her. Years later a nurse will let you do the same thing in those last long moments before your first child is born. You say `first' with forethought, carefully, having considered whether it is really true that he is your first child, but you have decided that right now it is the only way to live with yourself. Each time, you are grateful and surprised that a stranger is the one you let inside and the one who hurts you the least. And both times, you know that this must be telling, this paradox of connection and pain, distance and comfort, but you can't make sense of it and soon the thoughts disappear, replaced by something else. Emptiness, perhaps. Maybe a child. Something.

When Meg is done, they let you go back to see her. She is resting in a reclining chair and she looks less made up than you have ever seen her, as if they washed her face instead of taking the baby from her. She cried; you can tell this, and you wonder if the tears were strong enough, a steady enough torrent, to take the makeup down in the salt and water, running black and blue down her neck.

"Thank God you're here," she murmurs, eyes closed.

You leave God out of this; you have to leave God out of this or the whole thing falls apart. You mutter some answer, you help her get dressed, you ease her into the car and fasten her seatbelt as if she is one of your children, not saying your habitual prayer, the one that comes unbidden to your lips as you get onto the fast-running highway. You believe in God but you've avoided church because you find that the bricks and mortar don't help you pray; the shape of a place made just for prayer confuses you, with God as some sort of elected official and prayer a campaign promise, a competition. You don't like the rules, although you tend to follow them; you take offense at someone sitting in a throne-like chair making pronouncements -- ones that you instinctively know must be made silently in the white interior of the soul. It has been hard to find a place to pray since you were seventeen; red-brick buildings all look the same -- church or clinic---a long way to go for such small comfort.

All of this is running through your mind, against your will; you try not to think about God as you drive Meg to your home as though it is a place of comfort and recovery. She will move past this day quickly or not so quickly; she'll slip back into her life and her mistakes and her favors that need doing. And you'll return to your life, too, accumulating scars here and there, this day tallied up as one more day among many.

Sometimes you find yourself thinking about the first child: in January, when a president is inaugurated; in mid-October, when you might have been planning a birthday party; while summer surprises you in a last blaze of orange and brown glory, with winter waiting just around the corner to catch you unaware, as if you have not yet learned the seasons. Then, you think of her and you think of his strong arms; you think of hearts that did the best they could---this is what you tell yourself. You think of her, because if you tell the truth, she was always a child, not the it you said back then; she was your firstborn, your first unborn.

It is when you begin to see her as real that you run into trouble; there is a moment when everything you told yourself back then splits apart and makes no sense; she breathes; you can feel her warm breath and smell her skin or the way something soft, a hand, maybe, feels as her body presses against yours. There is an emptiness when you think of her because you never knew that swelling fullness: she was there, and then she was not. You have nothing by which to know her. It has taken you all this time just to begin to say goodbye, to come to realize that there were even goodbyes that needed to be said.

Meg calls out casually as if you are a servant being summoned and you go wearily in and sit beside her. She is recuperating in your bed.

"Do you believe it's a child?" she asks.

"Meg," you say, campaigning, "It was so early. So early." You didn't expect the question and this answer is the only one you can summon up because you've always been a lousy liar and so when you lie, you must do it in a way that folds in some elemental truth with the deception. Meg eyes you suspiciously; you look away.

You're seeing long auburn hair and green eyes, the way your child might have looked; her image forms as clearly as if you're proudly waving a school picture in your hand. You're seeing someone who is at once sensible and magical, someone so full of herself that you feel in lucky, glorious danger of being bowled right over in her presence. A power to be reckoned with; this is how you always imagine her. Like you were, like you were going to be. You close your eyes so that you will not see what you are sure is the recrimination in your child's wide, appraising gaze. It is, of course, still there when you close your eyes.

Meg lets you off the hook, nodding slowly. "You're right," she says. She has no idea.

You sit outside after checking on Meg, and think about your narrow world, about how, in this life, you are so much the answer and never the question. You think about how much you love your children, how much you owe them, too. How they smell, how they feel in your arms, the things they say that are wonder-filled or half-crazy or just small, simple; you take sustenance from these things. Their skin, how you love their skin, how solid they feel, how warm. Whatever mistakes you might have made are alive and changing shape in the small, unregretted lives of your children.

Someday you will find quiet, time to think. Silence will surround you like a shiver, a promise, a first kiss. When you lose yourself in the eclipse of memory, your grown-up children will arrive like the rescuing sun to warm you, throwing themselves onto the thoughts that return because they must. You will be grateful when your children come, grateful for the heat, the chaos, and you will remember an earlier winter when there seemed to be no promise to flood the shadows with light. Your memories will take you to a time before you learned to find grace in chaos; in that cold January you were grateful only for order, only for a return to something less than what is possible.

You will learn that being visited by promise is worthwhile even when the promise is broken -- by you, by someone else. In the comforting and unfamiliar silence of someday, you will try on whispered goodbyes to your first child. You will find the words to make her understand.

Somewhere along the line she has become confused with you, with someone you once were and don't know how to be anymore. Nothing is as you thought it would be. You hear her voice, a bell ringing from the past, warning that so much of what we wish for is imperfect, fleeting.

Your children are crying, or maybe laughing; you strain to hear her voice, too, but instead there is a funnel of silence: a tornado visiting itself upon the small town of your life. You know this sound: it keens like metal being torn from the sides of trailers, like roofs being lifted off the tops of houses and sent spinning into the sky; this sound, a crying wind of emptiness that will not settle, has carried destruction; it has turned you on your side, upside down, leaving pieces of you scattered.

If you listen closely, you can almost hear the sound that comes after the last of the storm, after it takes itself out of your path. What you hear is a voice stilled, a language of silence: unformed thoughts, questions unasked, questions unanswered. When you try to call to the wind, lifting up your hands to dance into its abandoned arms, no one answers; no one ever answers.