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Nice Big American Baby
Judy Budnitz


‘Unforgettable and utterly affecting. You can’t turn the pages fast enough’ Dave EggersJudy Budnitz, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted novel If I Told You Once and the critically acclaimed collection Flying Leap. creates her own brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection of blisteringly inventive and surreal new stories. Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspective, no matter how odd it might be. Clever, comic and perpetually surprising, these are stories that demand to be read again and again.‘A truly talented young writer.’ Times












nice big american baby

judy budnitz










dedication (#ulink_ad3e7462-f481-5505-81f5-265e0a27f92f)


for amanda davis




contents


cover (#uef862738-8442-500d-841d-9cf553d31f3a)

title page (#u9893f8d3-92cf-5d33-bd14-80f8af4f0d9f)

dedication

where we come from (#u4f94c4b0-92b8-59ef-9107-b681da22d0c4)

flush (#ub7fb701c-080a-5622-84f7-2d8cccd89782)

nadia (#uad624373-f75d-5401-9624-10e92833a7be)

visitors (#litres_trial_promo)

saving face (#litres_trial_promo)

miracle (#litres_trial_promo)

sales (#litres_trial_promo)

elephant and boy (#litres_trial_promo)

immersion (#litres_trial_promo)

the kindest cut (#litres_trial_promo)

preparedness (#litres_trial_promo)

motherland (#litres_trial_promo)

acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

about the author (#litres_trial_promo)

praise (#litres_trial_promo)

by the same author (#litres_trial_promo)

copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

about the publisher (#litres_trial_promo)





where we come from (#ulink_5129ae6e-6a8b-5634-bcb4-fb6ec9dbfe55)

1. before


There was a woman who had seven sons and was happy. Then she had a daughter.

She loved her sons with a furious devotion. But she did not want the daughter, even before she knew it was a daughter. She could feel the baby sitting low in her belly and did not want it.

Another burden on my back, the woman thought, another mouth to feed.

From the moment the girl was born she was frail and sickly; she greeted the world with a sneeze. The mother heard the sneeze and felt a heaviness descend upon her heart. Even with the best coddling and foreign medicine, the girl would probably die within the month. Three years at the most. A waste. It would be better, she thought, if the girl died now and got it over with. There were many ways a baby could die. Infant death was common in that part of the world; no one would notice one baby more or less.

Then she looked at the tiny wrinkled face and felt ashamed. She resolved to love her daughter as she did her sons.

She named the girl Precious, to remind herself.

She made a promise to her daughter, but her seven sons were a delight and a distraction and if she did not break that promise she did bend it to its limits, like a young tree in a windstorm. Precious learned to make no demands on her mother. She took the food from the bottom of the bowl at meals and kept her feet clean so she would not leave footprints behind her.

The woman was happy. Her sons grew tall. People told her how lucky she was: eight children, all of them still living.

But I have seven children, she would say. And then: Oh. Yes.

One year the rains came doubly hard, the roads became rivers of mud, and the fruit rotted on the vine. The next year the rains did not come at all. Surely, people said, the third year will be a good year. But they were wrong.

It had never happened before—two years without rain. Even those people who considered themselves modern began to pray again and to hang charms at their doors.

The underground stream that fed the electric pump in the village dried up. The woman’s sons went searching for water. They were tall and thin and knew how to travel in the heat of day. They ran and rested, ran and rested. Each time they paused they arranged themselves in a descending line so that all but the oldest could rest in a brother’s shadow.

They had taken buckets and jars to carry water back to their mother. And to Precious. Precious: always remembered, but always as an afterthought.

They found a wire fence. The top of the fence was lined with prickly wire like a thornbush. They tore their hands on it, climbing over. Far in the distance they could see a dark smudge bleeding into the sky. They ran closer. It was the largest building they had ever seen, massive and gray and faceless, with three tall chimneys like fingers pointing to the sky. The black smoke that poured from them was like nothing they had ever seen before. It hung in the sky without dissipating, it was dense and heavy, like rain clouds about to burst.

The oldest said it was a rain factory. He said he remembered hearing people talk about it. He was sure.

Yes, said another, I heard that too. It’s true.

Beyond the building they saw a pool, almost a lake. It was perfectly shaped and perfectly still, and the water was the strangest color they had ever seen—bright, bright blue and iridescent, with pearly rainbows on its surface. They agreed that the color must mean it was very pure.

The first one to taste the water became very sick. His brothers watched him twisting and retching, his arms folded in on themselves like wings. A thick white gravy came out of his mouth and nose. They heard a roaring in the stillness and looked up to see two trucks speeding toward them trailing clouds of dust. They lifted their brother and ran.

They knew their brother could not climb the fence, so they hid among the rocks where they knew the trucks could not follow, and they waited for dark. They dug beneath the fence with their hands. It took them most of the night. They knotted their shirts into a sling and headed home, carrying their brother between them.

The woman was waiting on her doorstep for her sons to return. In the red light of dawn she saw their silhouettes approaching. She counted only six bobbing heads and began to keen in her throat.

Her son did not die. Eventually his hands uncoiled and he was able to walk again. But he was not the same as he was before. His face had hardened into a new expression that made him look like a suspicious stranger.

She knew that was not the end of it. The poisoned water was the beginning, a portent of what was to come. She was not surprised when, soon after, her sons began to disappear one by one.

The rains still did not fall. Everyone was hungry. The earth was cracked and barren. There was no work to be done, and anger and discontent began to ferment in the hearts of the people. Some complained against the government, though many had never seen the slightest evidence of any government and did not believe it existed. There was talk of electing leaders, building an army, an army for the people. The woman listened but did not understand how an army could bring the rains.

The woman’s eldest son came to her and said he was going to become a soldier.

But you’re just a child, she said.

The army has a whole division just for children, he said. I’m already too old for it. I will have to join the men.

She saw his thin chest surge with pride as he said this, and her heart ached.

So he left and she knew she would not see him again. Soon another son left to join his brother. It was the one who had drunk the tainted water; he waved as he walked up the dusty road and she could see he was trying to smile for her, but his facial muscles were frozen in a sneer.

One of the younger boys announced that he was going to join the children’s army. She forbade it. He ran away in the night.

She heard rumors of fighting, the people’s army fighting the government’s, factions of the people’s army fighting each other. There was an outbreak of fever in the village and many people died, including her youngest son.

So she had three sons left. Then two more went off to fight. They went together; that, at least, was a comfort.

Don’t become a soldier, she told her last remaining son.

I don’t want to, he said, but they will force me to if I stay.

She knew. She had seen boys being dragged down the street, people averting their eyes. But she did not want him to leave.

He told her he wanted to go to the capital. He asked for money to get there. She would not give it to him, but he stole it and left while she slept. He was a hundred miles from home when the bus skidded off the road and rolled over.

Now the daughter she didn’t want was all she had. The woman was not so much bitter as resigned to her fate; she suspected she was being punished for her thoughts at the girl’s birth. All the furious love the woman had lavished on her sons she now poured on her daughter, and for the first time Precious’s name seemed justified.

The daughter cowered under the assault, after the years in her brothers’ shadows. She had been accustomed to being invisible. Her mother’s attention now seemed like a burden; she missed the airy feeling of being disposable, inconsequential.

The woman did not speak of her sons at home. To the others in the village she bemoaned her losses. But you are lucky, people said. You still have a child. Still alive. Many of us have none left. You are one of the lucky ones.

Yes, she said, I suppose I am.

The woman who had never been afraid now began to fear that her one last child would be taken from her. She tried to hide her daughter, disguise her value, shield her from anyone who might take her away.

She stopped calling her daughter by her name and instead used “Sister.”

Precious did not mind. Her mother seemed determined to name her exactly what she was not.

The woman closed her doors and kept her happiness close and hidden, a miser with her hoard.

The soldier appeared at the door, and before Precious could say a word he cried out how he’d missed her and hugged her to him. He smelled like a week’s worth of sweat, and when he smiled his cheeks stretched into taut creases that looked like they might split at any moment. Don’t you remember me? he said. Of course she didn’t. She’d never seen him before.

He did the same to her mother, embracing her before she could resist. Precious saw her mother’s face, propped on the man’s shoulder, the eyes closed, and for just a moment her mother looked blissful. Then the eyes opened and her mother’s face hardened again.

It’s good to be home, he said.

He’s lying, Precious said sullenly.

Her mother knew it too. And yet she cooked him a meal and allowed him to stay the night. She kept closing her eyes for a few seconds at a time; Precious knew she was imagining that it was true, that one of her sons really had come home.

In the dark of early morning Precious heard a creak and felt a breath on her shoulder. A finger found its way beneath her blanket, it pointed and beckoned. She turned over. And then everything happened fast, before she could say a word, like a gourd cracked open and the pulp scooped out, to be replaced by something else.

In the morning the woman arose to find her imposter son gone and her daughter too. One of them had taken all the money she had.

This is the story the daughter tells to her unseen audience, the listener swaying in a travel hammock made of her own flesh. She tells the story over and over, the rhythm of her voice matching the rocking rhythm of her legs, hoping he will understand.




2. during


“If you’re an illegal,” the man says, “the only absolutely surefire way to get into America is to stow away inside a woman’s belly.”

She asks him what he means. He tells her that anyone born on American soil is automatically a citizen. “Doesn’t matter who or what the parents are.”

“But what happens to the baby’s mother? She’s the mother of a citizen now.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Anyone without papers, if they catch you they’ll deport you. And they will catch you. Probably take your baby away.”

Her hands slide down the front of her dress.

He narrows his eyes. “You seem determined.” She nods. “Do you know how to swim? Ever been chased by dogs? Can you run fast on those pretty legs?” She nods; she has never done the first two, but surely they are instinctive. Surely, under duress, her body will know what to do.

“Will you still be able to run fast in a month? Two?” he says and with a sudden brisk movement cups his hand against her stomach.

“Yes,” she says, trying not to flinch.

“I might just be able to help you,” he says. “How much money do you have?”

She wants to go to America. She’s heard they give you a free dishwasher the minute you cross the border. In American stores there is always a hundred of everything, food as far as the eye can see, more food than you could eat in a lifetime. There is plenty of work for anyone who wants it, because the Americans are the laziest people on earth and will do nothing they can pay someone else to do for them.

Once you get there, everyone agrees, the rest is easy. Soon you’ll be a lazy American yourself, having fat children and buying furniture. Furniture? Yes, a woman tells her, in America if you want furniture, a refrigerator, even a car, you can pay a tenth of the price and take the things home; the Americans will trust you to pay the rest later. They are as trusting and gullible as children.

The visions of abundance keep her up at night. It’s not for herself that she wants these things. It’s for her baby. She knows he is a son, riding high inside her; with every breath she feels his heels crowding against her lungs.

Months earlier, when she told her cousin she was pregnant, her cousin hugged her and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it. I know two good ways. One hurts less but takes longer. The other hurts a lot but is over quick. Which do you want?”

“No!” she cried. “Neither,” she said, pushing her cousin away.

She cannot even contemplate getting rid of the baby. She loves him already, has begun crooning to him and addressing conversations to her belly long before she starts to show. But as her son pushes out the front of her dress farther and farther, she begins to wonder. Does she want to raise her son in a country where half the babies die before they are a year old? A country where a woman could have eight children and consider herself lucky if one survives to adulthood?

She begins collecting stories of America. She builds a house in her mind, furnishes it, plants trees outside. She imagines her son, fat and white, playing on a vast expanse of immaculate carpet. She sees him as a boy, big and healthy and strong, wearing stiff brand-new clothes, pushing the other boys so they fall down. She pictures him when he’s her age—by American standards, still a child, he’ll be going to school, playing with his friends, whistling at girls, and trying to put his hand up their short American skirts.

For some reason, whenever she pictures her son he is bald, his head white and oversized and glowing slightly, like an enormous lightbulb. She puts a baseball cap on him. Better.

“You’re crazy,” her cousin says. “They’ll take your baby away and give him to some American parents. They’ll snatch him away the minute you get there and send you back. Americans love foreign babies.”

“Love to eat them,” the cousin’s friend says. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

“Do you want your baby taken away and raised by foreigners?” her cousin says.

Of course not, she says, and suddenly realizes she does.

She sees the strange man again and asks if he can help her.

“You want to cross over,” he says. She gives him half a nod.

“You’re in luck. It’s a side business of mine, arranging these things.”

She looks around to see if anyone is listening.

“Just remember,” he says, “there are no guarantees. If they catch you and deport you, I don’t give you your money back. If they catch you, I don’t know you. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

She nods. The first time she met him he was wearing a flowered shirt and a baseball cap like the one her son wears in her daydreams. Today he is wearing a cowboy hat and a nice-looking suit. When he turns to go she sees that it is all crumpled in the back, riding up into his armpits.

She tries, and fails, to remember his eyes. She thinks he has a mustache.

They meet again so she can give him the money, and he asks for her name.

“Precious,” she says, and looks away. She does not like to reveal her name; she senses it is dangerous for anyone to know her true worth. Precious is the name of someone treasured, adored. It means there are people somewhere who would gladly pay ransom for her, rescue her from a tower, lay down their lives for her. This is not true, but it is what people assume. She’s afraid he’ll raise his price.

But he grins a wide face-creasing grin. He thinks they’re playing a game, giving themselves nicknames. “Then call me Hopper,” he says. “First name Border. And what about”—he nods at the front of her dress—“what about Junior there?”

She stares back at him stonily refusing to acknowledge anything.

“You know,” he says softly, “they don’t like it. They don’t like this kind of thing.”

“What thing?”

“What you’re trying to do. They see it as an abuse of the system. They’ll try to stop you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Good!” he says, breaking into a smile again. Today he is wearing grease-stained coveralls such as a car mechanic would wear and, beneath it, incongruously, a spotless white dress shirt. In a brisk businesslike voice, he says, “We here at Hopper and Associates have many options to offer the busy traveler. Would you prefer plane, train, boat, or automobile? Business class or coach? Smoking or nonsmoking?”

She turns the choices over in her mind. “I’ve never been on a boat.”

“I’m joking, sweetie.”

“Yes,” she says. “I knew that.”

She sees the border in her dreams: an orange stripe, wide as a road, dividing a desert from horizon to horizon. The border is hot; people run across it screaming in pain, their shoes smoking. The border guards are lined up in pairs on the other side, each pair with a swatch of black rubbery webbing stretched between them. The moment someone reaches their side of the border, two guards snag him and slingshot him back to the other side. The guards are neat and precise; nobody gets through. The people pick themselves up and try again, running across the scalding line. Again and again they are repulsed. Some are flung through the air; some are sent skidding across the border on their faces. The people tire, they are staggering, crawling, propping each other up. The guards continue their work mechanically, occasionally pausing to take a man’s wallet or fondle a woman’s breast before sending them back over. There is something about the guards’ alert, smooth movements that seems familiar, as if she’s seen all this before.

She must work out the timing of the crossing as precisely as possible. If she goes too soon, it will mean spending more time, pregnant and waiting, on the other side. The longer she’s there, the greater the chances the deportation people will catch her and send her back before her son is even born.

But if she waits too long he’ll be born outside the border, on un-American soil, and will never get his baseball cap, his citizenship.

She has told her son about America, told him about her plans. Told him the story of a woman and her seven stolen sons. That’s what you can look forward to, she told him, if we stay. She hopes she can count on his cooperation.

The man, Hopper, doesn’t care about her plans. “You’ll go when I tell you to go,” he says. “You can’t control these things. You have to seize opportunities as they arise.”

She waits and waits. Apparently the opportunities are slow to bubble up. She’s in her ninth month when the time comes. She rides a bus to a border town, arrives at the meeting place.

She and six others cram into a secret space behind a false panel in the back of a delivery truck. There are a few nail holes for air. They are afraid to talk; when one makes the slightest noise the others pinch him, roll their eyes. They are all strangers to one another. Their initial excessive courtesy dissipates with the rising heat. The metal walls are like an oven. One man insists on smoking. The two people on either side of Precious accuse her of taking up too much room.

There are delays; the truck stops and starts, the back door opens and closes. At first they all freeze expectantly every time this happens. But the stops continue. Precious begins to wonder if the driver has forgotten about them and is going about his usual deliveries.

Night falls, they know this when dots of light in the nail holes go out and they are in total blackness. No one lets them out.

The second day is more of the same. One man wants to bang on the walls; they’ve forgotten us, he says. The others restrain him. The heat rises and they squabble silently over the last plastic jug of water.

On the third day they all fall into a stupor, frozen in positions of cramped despair. The only one stirring is Precious’s son, kicking impatiently. On the evening of the third day they cross the border without knowing it.

It is dark again when the truck stops, footsteps approach, the metal door is wrenched back. They blink in the glare of a flashlight as the driver helps them out. He tries to make them hurry but they cannot unfold themselves. He carries them out one by one, like statues in tortured poses, and places them on the ground, where they lie unmoving for a long time and then begin to uncurl as slowly as new leaves unfurling.

They lie on hard earth surrounded by trees. The truck disappears down a dirt track leading back to the highway. They begin to groan and creak and stretch themselves—small things first, fingers and toes. Precious stands up and leans against a tree. She tries walking a few steps. The movement makes something shift within her, then shift again, sinking lower, like the tumblers of a lock falling into place. Good, she thinks. Right on time.

She heads down the track toward the highway. The others call after her, warnings, halfhearted offers of help. She knows they’re glad to be rid of her. She’s a burden, a liability.

She walks along the highway. So far America is a disappointment, bare and empty. It’ll get better, she tells herself. Americans, she knows, are optimistic. She thinks of big white gleaming American hospitals.

She waves at the occasional cars zooming past. She can’t see the drivers’ faces. If she were in their place she wouldn’t stop either, she thinks. Who wants a strange woman having a baby all over your nice clean American car?

But within minutes a car pulls over to the shoulder ahead of her. She clutches her son, tries to walk more quickly. Americans really are friendly after all.

The car is a dull gray, dirty, unremarkable, and she’s close before she notices the heavy wire mesh separating the backseat from the front. The driver has already stepped out of the car and has his hand on her arm before she can think of running.

He helps her into the backseat and drives on. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her, seems to know exactly who she is and what she’s doing. He’s driving in the same direction she’d been heading. At first she thinks he’s going to help her after all; then she realizes that they are heading back to the border, that she’d been pointed in the wrong direction.

She’s still hopeful. Everyone says even when you get caught, they make you stay in a detention center for weeks while they ask you questions and write words on pieces of paper. She’ll have her baby and then go home.

But that’s not allowed to happen. She’s rushed through a series of gates and hallways and waiting rooms, and people ask her questions and eye her belly and hustle her along. Before she knows it she’s sitting in a van with other defeated-looking people who don’t meet her eyes. She recognizes two of the people who shared her secret place in the delivery truck but pretends not to.

This time she can see the border as they cross it. It’s not how she pictured it. Just a fence, a checkpoint on the road. She holds her belly. Her son is shifting around. Not yet, she thinks fiercely. Not yet.

She looks for the Hopper man. She assumes he would have disappeared by now, but no, there he is. “Don’t be mad, little mama,” he says. “I told you there were no guarantees.”

She stamps her foot. The pressure inside her is unbelievable. But she wills her body to hold itself together.

“Tell you what,” he says. “How about I set up another trip for you? Free of charge? Because I’m such a nice guy?”

“Not the truck. The driver was bad. I think he told the border police where to find us.”

“That’s terrible,” the man says. “You just can’t trust anyone, can you? I won’t use him again.”

The second time is on a boat, a huge boat, a cargo ship. She doesn’t know what it’s carrying; the cargo could be anything; it’s packed into truck-sized metal rectangles, stacked up in anonymous piles.

She and twelve others hide in the hold. It’s dank, dark, cramped, but the gentle motion of the boat soothes her; this is what it must feel like for her son, she thinks.

Her son is very still. She worries that he is dead, but she tells herself that it’s only because he’s grown too big, has no room to move. Just a little longer, she thinks, and then you can come out and begin your new life. Some people told her America’s territory extends from its coastline, fifty miles into the ocean. Others have said five miles. She wants to wait for solid land to be absolutely sure.

But they’re stopped almost immediately. She and the others are sought out with flashlights, led up to the deck, and lowered into a smaller boat that speeds them back to the harbor. She would have tried to run, to hide, if not for her son. Any violent motion, she fears, will bring him tumbling out. If she jumped in the water, he might swim right out of her to play in the familiar element.

“My goodness,” the Hopper man says when he sees her. “Are you having twins?”

“Your boat people are bad,” she says furiously. “They told the border people we were there.”

“You don’t say! I certainly won’t be using their services anymore.”

“I think the border people pay them money to turn us in. A price for each person.”

“What makes you think that?”

She has heard people arguing, pointing at her and arguing over whether she should bring the price of one or two.

“We’ll get you over there,” the man says. “I give you my promise. Three’s the charm.”

The next time, she rides in a hiding place built between the backseat and trunk of a small car. They have trouble shutting her in; her belly gets in the way. It seems luxurious, after the first two trips. She has the space to herself. A man and woman sit in the front. On the backseat, inches from her, a baby coos in a car seat. She doesn’t know if it’s their baby or someone else’s, a borrowed prop. Her son shifts irritably, probably sensing the other baby, probably thinking, Now that’s the way to travel.

At the border they’re stopped, the trunk is opened. The panel is ripped away, and for the third time she’s blinking in bright light. She imagines her son beating his fists against the sides of her womb.

Not yet, she thinks, not yet, my son. Just a little longer.

She’s now nearing the end of her tenth month. Her belly is strained to the breaking point, her back aches, her knees buckle. But she’s more determined than ever. And her son seems to be as stubborn as she is.

“Now it looks like quadruplets,” Hopper says.

“He’s going to be an American baby,” she says, through gritted teeth. “Babies are bigger there. A nice big healthy American baby.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He’s not going to come out until we get there,” she says.

“I’ll do what I can,” he says. “No guarantees.”

She’s been told there are places where you can climb over the fence. There are places where there is no fence, only guards in towers who sometimes look the other way. She’s going to take her chances on her own. Enough of his gambles.

“I wish you the best,” he says, tipping his fishing hat.

She can barely walk; she stumbles, lurching and weaving. Other people look at her and say, “There’s no way. It’s impossible.” She ignores them.

She walks, through scrub brush and rocks and burning sand and stagnant, stinking water. She walks and walks, thinking: American baby. Nice big American baby.

She hears a sound echoing from far away: dogs yelping, frenzied. She can almost hear them calling to one another: There she is, there she is, get her.

They burst over a rise and she can see them, a mob of dark insects growing rapidly bigger, a man with a gun trailing far behind. Has she crossed the border already? It’s impossible to tell.

The first dog runs straight at her. She stands still and waits. It seems nearly as big as she is, a small horse. At the last minute it veers away and circles. All the dogs swarm around her. But they do not touch her. They keep their heads lowered abjectly to the ground. They seem in awe of her big belly.

The fat sweating guard who comes puffing up behind them is not impressed. Soon she’s sitting in a familiar van, heading back.

She’s been carrying her son for over a year now, with no intention of letting him go.

“Now, that can’t possibly be good for him, little mama,” Hopper says. “You should let the little feller out.”

“He’s going to be an American baby,” she says, slowly, as if talking to a child.

“Let me help you,” he says. “I know a man—”

“No,” she says.

“We’ll try another way. I can get you a fake passport.”

“No,” she says. She hobbles back to the border, is stopped by a fence, and begins tunneling under it, clawing the dirt with her fingernails. She’s crawling through, nearly breaking the surface on the other side, when her son shifts, or perhaps instantaneously grows a fraction of an inch, and suddenly she’s stuck. Border guards come and drag her out by her heels. They don’t seem surprised, they seem as if they’ve been expecting her. They look bored, almost disappointed, as if they’d expected her to have a little more originality.

“Why won’t you let me help you?” Hopper says.

She doesn’t answer.

“Free of charge.”

“Why are you being so generous?”

“I don’t know. Out of the goodness of my heart?”

Today he’s wearing a bolo tie, a snakeskin vest. He is wearing rings on every finger, like a king, like a pirate. Like a pirate king.

“Please,” he says. “I want to. I insist.”

She realizes something she should have seen months ago. He’s been tipping off the border guards. He takes money from people for helping them cross; then he takes money from the guards for telling them when and where to expect visitors. She’s been making money for him with each of her trips.

“You are a bad man,” she says.

“Oh, come now,” he says. “You can’t blame me. It’s a game of chance.”

“An evil man. When my son gets big he’ll come back and kill you.”

“Your son’s already big,” he says. “And I don’t see him doing anything.”

She is determined. She flings herself at the border again and again. She travels in cars, trucks, buses. She walks on blistered feet. She travels in a fishing boat, an inflatable raft. She wears disguises, buys false papers. Each time the border repulses her, spits her back.

Big American baby, she tells herself. She sees his size as proof of his American-ness. Only American babies could be so big, so healthy. She has convinced herself that he has always been American, that she is merely a vehicle, a shell, a seed casing meant to protect him until he can be planted in his rightful home.

She carries him for two years. She constructs a sort of sling for herself, with shoulder straps and a strip of webbing, to balance the weight. She uses a cane. She looks like a spider, round fat body, limbs like sticks.

Her son is alive; she can feel the pulse of his heartbeat, feel the pressure as he strains to stretch a finger, an eyelid.

She thinks she can see a dark shadow through the taut translucent skin of her belly. She can see his hair growing long and black.

Her body is adaptable. Her skin stretches, her bones shift, her blood feeds him. When people see her they are amazed, but she is not; she has seen it before, the lengths the body will go to to preserve itself, to cling to life.

Big American baby, she thinks. Nice big American baby. It is her mantra.

She carries him for three years. Three and a half. She becomes a legend, then a joke, with the border guards. They wave to her as she creeps past, cheer her on, drag her back at the last minute.

Don’t you think he wants to come out by now? people at home say to her.

He’s safer living in my belly than in this wretched country, she says, though she has been so single-mindedly set on her mission that she has taken no notice of external events. War, famine, peace, prosperity: it is all the same to her. America is the only option, the only ray of hope.

She carries him for four years.

Big American baby. Nice big American baby.

She has in her mind pictures of hot-air balloons attached to bicycles, fanciful flying machines. Some days she imagines she will simply lift off the ground and float over, suspended by the power of her will alone. Hers and her son’s. Or she imagines that she is invisible, intangible; she breezes across the border. The air, it seems, is the only thing that crosses freely.

Her son is so big, she imagines he fills her completely, his arms fill her arms, his legs fill her legs. She is a mere skin covering him, like an insect’s carapace, soon to be flaked off and shucked away.

She’s too tired to speak now, just pants and whistles through her teeth. The words rattle in her head.

Nice big American baby, someone chants. Not her. Him. The voice of her son gurgling up from her belly. Muffled and airless but undeniable.

My son’s first words, she thinks, smiling proudly at a shriveled bush. You hear that? No baby-talk preliminaries, no babbling or lisping. My son: so precocious, so American.

One day, as she is panting out her mantra and picking her way across the sand, a border guard appears: suddenly, as if he sprang up out of the ground. He carries the usual gun, wears the usual impenetrable sunglasses, has the regulation sweat stains blooming from his armpits. He takes her arm. She obediently turns around and begins walking back. She does not want him to start pushing her, getting rough; the baby might come out.

But to her surprise she finds him pulling her forward, forward across the magic invisible line. Forward, toward the magnificent city that hovers like a mirage in the distance.

“Come on, little mama,” he says. “You’ve had enough.”

When she closes her eyes she sees the hospital of her dreams, a white sparkling grand hotel. When she opens them she sees speckled ceiling tiles, masked alien faces. She can’t feel a thing; she’s a floating head. It’s finally happened, then: her stubborn impatient head has taken off and left the slow body behind somewhere to gestate, egg and nest all in one.

“My son,” she says.

“He’s coming,” they tell her. They have to operate. “There’s no way he’s fitting through the usual door,” they tell her.

She sees a foot kicking. It’s as long as her hand. She hears a stupendous, deafening roar. The foot catches one of the masked doctors on the chin and sends him flying backward into the spattered arms of another masked figure.

Her balloon head is bobbing near the ceiling now, borne on the baby’s howls, but she’d swear she can hear, interspersed with the empty cries, bellowed words. I want, the baby demands. Give me, I want, I need, I deserve, I have earned.…

She sees rising up out of her tired body a sodden mop of long black hair. She sees grasping fists.

She hears—and surely she must be dreaming now—she hears the scrape of a rubber-gloved hand rubbing a sore chin and a doctor’s voice saying, “Now that’s what I call a nice big American baby.”

Empty, deflated, she sits alone in the back of the van. She hears weeping somewhere, mingled with the sounds of tires on asphalt. It must be the driver. It can’t be her. Can it? Impossible. There’s nothing inside her to come out, not a drop. She’s hollow, she’s still floating, they forgot to reattach her head to those rags and remnants that were her body.

“But it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Wasn’t that the whole plan, give birth and leave him here with a new set of folks?”

“I never even got a chance to hold him.”

“He’s too big for holding already. He could hold you.”

“I had things to say. Stories to tell him.”

“He heard them. He was listening, all those years when you talked to him. He’ll remember.”

It’s the voice of the Hopper man; she’s not sure if he’s the man driving the van or if the voice is inside her head. It doesn’t matter.

“I want to stay,” she whispers. “He’s mine.”

“You can always have another.”




3. after


The prospective parents had applied for a newborn baby, so they did not know what to make of the walking, talking child they visited at the temporary foster home. The adoption agent assured them he had been born only a few days earlier. “I have his birth certificate right here,” she said.

Maybe children these days grow up faster than they used to, the hopeful parents told themselves. We should have studied the child development book more carefully, they thought.

They did not voice their doubts, fearing they’d reveal their inexperience, their ignorance. One slip of the tongue and their application would be rejected.

They felt intimidated by the adoption agent, who handled babies as carelessly as basketballs, and also by the foster mother, who had eight children in her charge.

The prospective mother had been looking forward to the cuddling, burping, nurturing years; she’d been gearing herself up for sleepless nights of colic and lullabies and martyrdom. The child before them, calmly regarding them with large brown eyes, was already far beyond that stage. Yet there was something so appealing, so desirable, so eminently wantable about him that both prospective parents found themselves smitten. They had to have him. He sat on the carpet knocking one block against another, seemingly bored, covertly watchful. They both felt a quickening in their hearts: the anxiety of bargain hunting—the sensation that if they did not get him immediately, someone else would come along, perceive his value, and snatch him up.

When they brought him home he ran through the house pointing at things, wanting to learn their names. “Microwave,” they said. “Piano.” “Baby monitor.” “Treadmill.” “Shoe tree.” “Television.”

They were charmed by his curiosity. Privately they fretted over the way he stiffened whenever they touched him. He was remote, as patiently tolerant as a teenager suffering the whims of unhip parents.

He just needs time, they thought, to get used to us.

What does bonding mean, exactly the new mother wondered. She thought of the unknown woman, the biological mother who’d carried the boy inside her body for nine whole months, and realized she was jealous.

The boy was too well-behaved, too precocious, too perfect. It made them nervous. His perfection made him seem vulnerable, ripe for spoiling. Doesn’t it seem like the perfect, angelic little boys are always the ones to get cancer, get hit by cars? the mother thought.

He never made any mistakes. If there were mistakes to be made, they’d be made by the parents. So they washed everything twice, planned educational vacations. The pressure was excruciating.

He’d been their son for over a year when he told them about the face.

He appeared at their bedside in the middle of the night, white and glowing in his astronaut pajamas. “Can I come in?” he said.

They relished the moment, kissing him, tickling him, tucking him in between them.

“Did you have a bad dream?” the mother said.

“There was a face in the window,” the boy said, and described glittering eyes and shining teeth and a wiry net of hair, long fingers scrabbling at the sill and warm breath that seeped into the room. A sad face. It watched him for a long time, he said, not moving.

“It isn’t real,” the father said. “It’s only a dream.”

The mother thought of goblins, gypsies, pirates, a hundred fairy tales of stolen children. She tightened her grip. “We’ll protect you,” she whispered fervently. “We’ll never let anyone take you away.”

“Take me away?” the boy said. The father groaned softly.

She realized she’d made a blunder, planting a new fear in his head that had not been there before.

The next day the father made a great show of testing the locks on the boy’s bedroom window. He pointed out the tree branches that moved in the wind like hair. He talked about the damp smells rising up from the basement, the stink and scrabbling of skunks digging through the garbage cans. The boy listened impassively.

For the next few nights the boy slept peacefully. The parents did not.

And then he was back, glowing in the dark, his feet padding across the floor. “It’s back,” he said calmly. They lifted their covers for him, pleased that he was finally having the normal problems of a normal child.

The face came back periodically. Not often, but every few weeks. The parents tried to dispel the son’s fears, but with less and less enthusiasm as time went on. They worried that if the nightmares stopped, the tenuous intimacy with their son would be gone forever. The mother, in her heart of hearts, secretly made contingency plans—if his nightmares stopped, she’d simulate them (a Halloween mask dangled from the roof, say).

If she left the imprint of a finger in his sandwich, her son would eat around it and leave the little island on his plate. He continued to flinch at the touch of her hand. Still, she sometimes wondered if he was secretly starved for affection, if he’d fabricated the face story as an excuse.

Or maybe, she thought, he’d invented the face as a way of comforting them. She wouldn’t put it past him, her wise little son.

In the night she stroked her son’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head. She wrapped her arms around him and pretended he was inside her.

The next morning she went into his room to make the bed and found the window open and the curtains frothing in the wind. She felt a momentary panic—danger! falling baby!—but the window guard was still in place. She closed the window and locked it. As she was turning away she noticed fingerprints spotting the glass. She must have done that herself, just now. How careless. I’ll clean it later, she thought, and bent to the bed, brushing away a few of her son’s long black hairs.

To her surprise, she found the bottom sheet damp. Never before had her son wet the bed. She dipped her fingers in the wet spot, feeling fascinated, amazed, intensely maternal. My son, she thought proudly, wets the bed. She imagined telling a friend about it. Oh, yes, like any normal child, he wets the bed occasionally. When he has a nightmare. What can you do? No, of course we’re not worried about it. He’ll outgrow it eventually.

But still there was something strange about it.… The stain was perfectly clear; it looked like water. And rather than one spot it was composed of many, a string of drops.

She glanced around furtively to make sure she was alone, then raised her wet fingers to her nose. She smelled nothing. She put her fingers to her tongue. The wetness tasted like tears.




flush (#ulink_989f5a72-4a8c-5462-b6cb-ec298241de5f)


I called my sister and said, What does a miscarriage look like?

What? she said. Oh. It looks like when you’re having your period, I guess. You have cramps, and then there’s blood.

What do people do with it? I asked.

With what?

The blood and stuff.

I don’t know, she said impatiently. I don’t know these things, I’m not a doctor. All I can tell you about anything is who you should sue.

Sorry, I said.

Why are you asking me this? she said.

I’m just having an argument with someone, that’s all. Just thought you could help settle it.

Well, I hope you win, she said.

I went home because my sister told me to.

She called me and said, It’s your turn.

No, it can’t be, I feel like I was just there, I said.

No, I went the last time. I’ve been keeping track, I have incontestable proof, she said. She was in law school.

But Mitch, I said. Her name was Michelle but everyone called her Mitch except our mother, who thought it sounded obscene.

Lisa, said Mitch, don’t whine.

I could hear her chewing on something, a ballpoint pen, probably. I pictured her with blue marks on her lips, another pen stuck in her hair.

It’s close to Thanksgiving, I said. Why don’t we wait and both go home then?

You forget—they’re going down to Florida to be with Nana.

I don’t have time to go right now. I have a job, you know. I do have a life.

I don’t have time to argue about it, I’m studying, Mitch said. I knew she was sitting on the floor with her papers scattered around her, the stacks of casebooks sprouting yellow Post-its from all sides, like lichen, Mitch in the middle with her legs spread, doing ballet stretches.

I heard a background cough.

You’re not studying, I said. Neil’s there.

Neil isn’t doing anything, she said. He’s sitting quietly in the corner waiting for me to finish. Aren’t you, sweetheart?

Meek noises from Neil.

You call him sweetheart? I said.

Are you going home or not?

Do I have to?

I can’t come over there and make you go, Mitch said.

The thing was, we had both decided, some time ago, to take turns going home every now and then to check up on them. Our parents did not need checking up, but Mitch thought we should get in the habit of doing it anyway. To get in practice for the future.

After a minute Mitch said, They’ll think we don’t care.

Sometimes I think they’d rather we left them alone.

Fine. Fine. Do what you want.

Oh, all right. I’ll go.

I flew home on a Thursday night, and though I’d told them not to meet me at the airport, there they were, both of them, when I stepped off the ramp. They were the only still figures in the terminal; around them people dashed with garment bags, stewardesses hustled in pairs wheeling tiny suitcases.

My mother wore a brown coat the color of her hair. She looked anxious. My father stood tall, swaying slightly. The lights bounced off the lenses of his glasses; he wore jeans that were probably twenty years old. I would have liked to be the one to see them first, to compose my face and walk up to them unsuspected, like a stranger. But that never happened. They always spotted me before I saw them and had their faces ready and their hands out.

Is that all you brought? Just the one bag?

Here, I’ll take it.

Lisa, honey, you don’t look so good. How are you?

Yes, how are you? You look terrible.

Thanks, Dad.

How are you? they said, over and over, as they wrestled the suitcase from my hand.

Back at the house, my mother stirred something on the stove and my father leaned in the doorway to the dining room and looked out the window at the backyard. He’s always leaned in that doorway to talk to my mother.

I made that soup for you, my mother said. The one where I have to peel the tomatoes and pick all the seeds out by hand.

Mother. I wish you wouldn’t do that.

You mean you don’t like it? I thought you liked it.

I like it, I like it. But I wish you wouldn’t bother.

It’s no bother. I wanted to.

She was up until two in the morning pulling skin off tomatoes, my father said. I could hear them screaming in agony.

How would you know? You were asleep, my mother said.

I get up at five-thirty every morning to do work in the yard before I go in to the office, he said.

I looked out at the brown yard.

I’ve been pruning the rosebushes. They’re going to be beautiful next summer.

Yes, they will.

Lisa, he said, I want you to do something for me tomorrow, since you’re here.

Sure. Anything.

I want you to go with your mother to her doctor’s appointment. Make sure she goes.

OK.

She doesn’t have to come, my mother said. That’s silly, she’ll just be bored.

She’s supposed to get a mammogram every six months, my father said, but she’s been putting it off and putting it off.

I’ve been busy. You know that’s all it is.

She’s afraid to go. She’s been avoiding it for a year now.

Oh, stop it, that’s not it at all.

She always finds a way to get out of it. Your mother, the escape artist.

My mother crossed her arms over her chest. There was a history. Both her mother and an aunt had had to have things removed.

It’s the same with all her doctors, my father said. Remember the contact lenses?

That was different. I didn’t need new contacts.

She stopped going to her eye doctor for fifteen years. For fifteen years she was wearing the same contacts. When she finally went in, the doctor was amazed, he said he’d never seen anything like it, they don’t even make contact lenses like that anymore. He thought she was wearing dessert dishes in her eyes.

You’re exaggerating, my mother said.

Mitch—I mean Lise, my father said.

He’d always gotten our names confused; sometimes, to be safe, he just said all three.

She’s afraid to go because of the last time, he said.

What happened last time? I said.

I had the mammogram pictures done, she said, and then a few days later they called and said the pictures were inconclusive and they needed to take a second set. So they did that and then they kept me waiting for the results, for weeks, without telling me anything, weeks where I couldn’t sleep at night, and I kept your father up too, trying to imagine what it looked like, the growth. Like the streaks in bleu cheese, I thought. I kept feeling these little pains and kept checking my pulse all night. And then finally they called and said everything was fine after all, there was just some kind of blur on the first X-rays, like I must have moved right when they took them or something.

You were probably talking the whole time, my father said. Telling them how to do their job.

I was probably shivering. They keep that office at about forty degrees and leave you sitting around in the cold in a paper robe. The people there don’t talk to you or smile; and when they do the pictures they mash your breast between these two cold glass plates like a pancake.

My father looked away. He had a kind of modesty about some things.

My mother said to me, All those nights I kept thinking about my mother having her surgery. I kept feeling for lumps, waking up your father and asking him to feel for lumps.

Leah, my father said.

He didn’t mind that. I think he might have enjoyed it a little.

Please.

Didn’t you?

Promise me you’ll go, he said.

She’s not coming, she said.

The next day we drove to the clinic an hour early. My mother had the seat drawn as close to the steering wheel as she could get it; she gripped the wheel with her hands close together at twelve o’clock. She looked over at me as often as she looked out at the road.

There were squirrels and possums sprawled on the pavement, their heads red smears.

It’s something about the weather, my mother said, makes them come out at night.

Oh.

We’re so early, my mother said, and we’re right near Randy’s salon. Why don’t we stop in and see if he can give you a haircut and a blowout?

Not now.

He wouldn’t mind, I don’t think. I talk about you whenever I have my hair done. He’d like to meet you.

No.

If you just got it angled on the sides, here, and got a few bangs in the front—

Just like yours, you mean.

You know, I feel so bad for Randy, he looks terrible, circles under his eyes all the time; he says his boyfriend is back in the hospital. Now whenever I go to get my hair cut, I bake something to give him, banana bread or something. But I think the shampoo girls usually eat it all before he can get it home.

That’s nice of you.

I worry about him. He doesn’t take care of himself.

Yes.

Why are you still getting pimples? You’re twenty-seven years old; why are you still getting pimples like a teenager?

Not everyone has perfect skin like you, I said. Green light. Go.

I do not have perfect skin, she said, bringing her hands to her face.

Both hands on the wheel, please. Do you want me to drive?

No, I don’t. You must be tired.

I touched my forehead. Small hard bumps like Braille.

She drove. I looked at the side of her face, the smooth taut skin. I wondered when she would start to get wrinkles. I already had wrinkles. On my neck. I could see them.

So, how is it going with this Piotr?

He’s all right.

Still playing the—what was it? Guitar?

Bass guitar.

She turned on the radio and started flipping through stations. Maybe we’ll hear one of his songs, she said brightly.

I told you he was in a band. I didn’t say they were good enough to be on the radio, I said.

Oh. I see. So the band’s just for fun. What else does he do?

Nothing. Yet.

So. What kind of name is Piotr? Am I saying it right?

Polish, I said.

I did not feel like telling her that only his grandmother lived in Poland; his parents were both born in Milwaukee, and he had grown up in Chicago and had never been to Poland; Piotr was a name he had given himself; he was not really a Piotr at all, he was a Peter with pretensions and long hair. I did not tell her this.

A black car cut into the lane in front of us. My mother braked suddenly and flung her right arm out across my chest.

Mother! Keep your hands on the wheel!

I’m sorry, she said, it’s automatic. Ever since you kids were little.…

I’m wearing a seat belt.

I know, honey, I can’t help it. Did I hurt you?

No, of course not, I said.

When we reached the parking garage my mother rolled down her window but couldn’t reach; she had to unfasten her seat belt and open the car door in order to punch the button and get her parking ticket. I looked at her narrow back as she leaned out of the car, its delicate curve, the shoulder blades like folded wings under her sweater, a strand of dark hair caught in the clasp of her gold necklace. I had the urge to slide across the seat and curl around her. It only lasted for a second.

She turned around and settled back into her seat, and the yellow-and-black-striped mechanical bar swung up in front of the car, and I tapped my feet impatiently while she slammed the door shut and rolled up the window. Now she was fiddling with her rearview mirror and straightening her skirt.

Come on, I said, watching the bar, which was still raised but vibrating a little.

Relax, honey, that thing isn’t going to come crashing down on us the minute we’re under it. I promise you.

I know that, I said, and then closed my eyes until we were through the gate and weaving around the dark oil-stained aisles of the parking garage. I would have liked to tell her about some of the legal cases Mitch had described to me: freak accidents, threshing machines gone awry, people caught in giant gears or conveyor belts and torn limb from limb, hands in bread slicers, flimsy walkways over vats of acid. Elevator cases, diving-board cases, subway-train cases, drowning-in-the-bathtub cases, electrocution-by-blender cases. And then there were the ones that were just called Acts of God.

I didn’t tell her.

Remember where we parked, she said.

OK.

But she did not get out of the car right away. She sat, gripping the wheel.

I don’t see why we have to do this, she said. Your father worries—

He’ll be more worried if you don’t go, I said, and anyway there’s nothing to worry about because everything’s going to be fine. Right? Right.

If there’s something wrong I’d just rather not know, she said to her hands.

We got out; the car shook as we slammed the doors.

She was right about the clinic. It was cold and it was ugly. She signed in with the receptionist and we sat in the waiting room. The room was gray and bare; the chairs were old vinyl that stuck to your thighs. The lights buzzed and seemed to flicker unless you were looking directly at them.

We sat side by side and stared straight ahead as if we were watching a movie.

There was one other woman waiting. She had enormous breasts. I could not help noticing.

I took my mother’s hand. It was very cold, but then her hands were always cold, even in summer, cool and smooth with the blue veins arching elegantly over their backs. Her hand lay limply in mine. I had made the gesture thinking it was the right thing to do, but now that I had her hand I didn’t know what to do with it. I patted it, turned it over.

My mother looked at me strangely. My hand began to sweat.

There was noise, activity somewhere; we could hear voices and footsteps, the crash and skid of metal, the brisk tones of people telling each other what to do. But we could see nothing but the receptionist in her window and the one woman who looked asleep, sagging in her chair with her breasts cupped in her arms like babies.

I need to use the restroom, my mother said, and pulled her hand away.

The receptionist directed us down the hall and around the corner. We went in, our footsteps echoing on the tiles. It was empty and reeked of ammonia. The tiles glistened damply.

Here, do something with yourself, my mother said, and handed me her comb. She walked down to the big handicapped stall on the end and latched the door.

I combed my hair and washed my hands and waited.

I looked at myself in the mirror. The lights were that harsh relentless kind that reveal every detail of your face, so that you can see all sorts of flaws and pores you didn’t even know you had. They made you feel you could see your own thoughts floating darkly just under your skin, like bruises.

Mother, I said. I watched her feet tapping around.

Lisa, she said, there’s a fish in the toilet.

Oh, please.

No, I mean it. It’s swimming around.

You’re making it up.

No, I’m not. Come see for yourself.

Well, it’s probably just some pet goldfish someone tried to flush.

It’s too big to be a goldfish. More like a carp. It’s bright orange. Almost red.

You’re seeing things—maybe it’s blood or something, I said; then I wished I hadn’t. The clinic was attached to the county hospital; all sorts of things were liable to pop up in the toilets: hypodermic needles, appendixes, tonsils.

No, no, it’s a fish, it’s beautiful really. It’s got these gauzy fins, like veils. I wonder how it got in here. It looks too large to have come through the pipes. It’s swimming in circles. Poor thing.

Well, then, come out and use a different one, I said. I suddenly started to worry that she was going to miss her appointment. You’re just stalling, I said.

Come in and see. We have to save it somehow.

I heard her pulling up her pantyhose, fixing her skirt. Then she unlatched the door to the stall and opened it. She was smiling. Look, she said.

I followed her into the stall.

Come see, she said. Together we leaned over the bowl.

I saw only the toilet’s bland white hollow and our two identical silhouettes reflected in the water.

Now where did he go? my mother said. Isn’t that the strangest thing?

We looked at the empty water.

How do you think he got out? she said. Look, you can see, the water’s still moving from where he was. Look, look—little fish droppings. I swear. Lisa, honey, look.

My mother is going crazy, I thought. Let’s go back to the waiting room, I said.

But I still have to use the bathroom, she said.

I stood by the sink and waited. You’re going to miss your appointment, I said. I watched her feet. Silence.

I was making her nervous. I’ll wait for you in the hall, I said.

So I left, leaned against the wall, and waited. And waited. She was taking a long time. I started to wonder if she had been hallucinating. I wondered if something really was wrong with her, if she was bleeding internally or having a weird allergic reaction. I didn’t think she was making it all up; she couldn’t lie, she was a terrible, obvious liar.

Mother, I called.

Mom, I said.

I went back into the bathroom.

She was gone.

The stall doors swung loose, creaking. I checked each cubicle, thinking she might be standing on the toilet seat, with her head ducked down the way we did to avoid detection in high school. In the handicapped stall the toilet water was quivering, as if it had just been flushed. I even checked in the cabinets under the sink and stuck my hand down in the garbage pail.

I stood there, thinking. She must have somehow left and darted past me without my noticing. Maybe I had closed my eyes for a minute. She could move fast when she wanted to.

Had she climbed out the window? It was a small one, closed, high up on the wall.

She had escaped.

I walked slowly down the halls, listening, scanning the floor tiles.

I thought of her narrow back, the gaping mouth of the toilet, pictured her slipping down, whirling around and vanishing in the pipes.

I tried to formulate a reasonable question: Have you seen my mother? A woman, about my height, brown hair, green eyes? Nervous-looking? Have you seen her?

Or were her eyes hazel?

I came back to the waiting room with the question on my lips—I was mouthing the words she’s disappeared—but when I got there the receptionist was leaning through the window calling out in an irritated voice: Ms. Salant? Ms. Salant? They’re ready for you, Ms. Salant.

The receptionist was opening the door to the examining rooms; the nurses and technicians were holding out paper gowns and paper forms and urine sample cups. Ms. Salant, Ms. Salant, we’re waiting, they called; people were everywhere suddenly, gesturing impatiently and calling out my name.

So I went in.

Later I wandered up and down the rows of painted white lines in the lot. I had forgotten where she parked the car. When I finally came upon it I saw her there, leaning against the bumper. For a moment I thought she was smoking a cigarette. She didn’t smoke.

When I drew closer I saw that she was nibbling on a pen.

We got in the car and drove home.

All of a sudden I thought of something I wanted to pick up for dinner, she said at one point.

Some fish? I said.

We drove the rest of the way without speaking.

So how did it go today, ladies? my father said that evening.

My mother didn’t say anything.

Did you go with her? he asked me. Yeah, I said.

So, you’ll hear the results in a few days, right? he said, with his hand on my mother’s back.

She looked away.

Right, I said.

She looked at me strangely but said nothing.

I told them not to but they both came to the airport Sunday night when I left.

Call me when you get the news, all right? I said.

All right, she said.

I wanted to ask her about the fish in the toilet, whether it had really been there. Whether she had followed the same route out of the clinic it had. But I couldn’t work myself up to it. And the topic never came up by itself.

We said good-bye at the terminal. My hugs were awkward. I patted their backs as if I were burping babies.

I told them to go home but I knew they would wait in the airport until the plane took off safely. They always did. I think my mother liked to be there in case the plane crashed during takeoff so she could dash onto the runway through the flames and explosions to drag her children from the rubble.

Or maybe they just liked airports. That airport smell.

I had a window seat; I pushed my carry-on under the seat in front. A man in a business suit with a fat red face sat down next to me.

I wondered if my mother even knew what I had done for her. I had helped her escape. Although at the time I hadn’t thought of it that way; I hadn’t really thought at all; I had gone in when I heard my name, automatic schoolgirl obedience, gone in to the bright lights and paper gowns and people who kneaded your breasts like dough. I began to feel beautiful and noble. I felt like I had gone to the guillotine in her place, like Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.

I called Piotr when I got home. I’m back, I said.

Let me come over, he said, I’ll make you breakfast.

It’s seven-thirty at night.

I just got up, he said.

My apartment felt too small and smelled musty. I’d been gone three days but it seemed longer. Piotr came and brought eggs and milk and his own spatula—he knew my kitchen was ill-equipped for anything but sandwiches.

He seemed to have grown, since I last saw him, and gotten more hairy; I looked at the hair on the backs of his hands, and the chest hair tufting out of his T-shirt.

He took up too much space. As he talked his nose and hands popped out at me, huge and distorted, as if I were seeing him through a fish-eye lens. He came close to kiss me and I watched his eyes loom larger and larger and blur out of focus and merge into one big eye over the bridge of his nose.

I was embarrassed. My mouth tasted terrible from the plane.

What kind of pancakes do you want? he asked.

The pancake kind, I said.

He broke two eggs with one hand and the yolks slid out between his fingers.

I can do them shaped like snowmen, he said, or rabbits, or flowers.

He was mixing stuff up in a bowl; flour slopped over the edges and sprinkled on the counter and the floor. I’ll have to clean that up, I thought.

Round ones, please, I said.

There was butter bubbling and crackling in the frying pan. Was that pan mine? No, he must have brought it with him—it was a big heavy skillet, the kind you could kill someone with.

He poured in the batter—it was thick and pale yellow—and the hissing butter shut up for a while. I looked in the pan. There were two large lumpy mounds there, side by side, bubbling inside as if they were alive, turning brown on the edges.

He turned them over and I saw the crispy undersides with patterns on them like the moon; and then he pressed them down with the spatula, pressed them flat and the butter sputtered and hissed.

There was a burning smell.

I’m not feeling very hungry right now, I said.

But I brought maple syrup, he said. It’s from Vermont, I think.

The pan was starting to smoke. Pushing him aside, I took it off the flame and put it in the sink. It was heavy; the two round shapes were now charred and crusted to the bottom.

Well, we don’t have to eat them, he said. He held out the bottle of syrup. Aunt Jemima smiled at me. She looked different. They must have updated her image; new hairstyle, outfit. But that same smile.

There’s lots of stuff we can do with syrup, he said. It’s a very romantic condiment.

He stepped closer and reached out and turned the knob on the halogen lamp. His face looked even more distorted in the dimness.

What? I said. Where did you get such a stupid idea?

Read it somewhere.

I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling very social tonight, I said. Peter, I said.

Oh, come on.

I missed my parents very much suddenly. You’re so insensitive, I said. Get out.

Hey, I am sensitive. I’m Mr. Sensitive. I give change to bums. Pachelbel’s Canon makes me cry like a baby.

Like a what? I said.

Why are you screaming at me? he said.

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, I said. I thought I was being smart and cutting. But he took it literally; he went out and closed the door behind him with great care.

My sister called later that night.

So how were they? she asked.

Fine, I said. Same as always.

Your voice sounds funny; what happened? she said.

Nothing.

Something’s wrong. Why don’t you ever tell me when something’s wrong?

There’s nothing, Mitch.

You never tell me what’s going on. When you think I’ll worry about something you keep it to yourself.

I tell you everything.

Well, then, tell me what was wrong with you earlier in the fall.

Nothing … I don’t know … there’s nothing to tell.

That was the truth. All that happened was I got tired of people for a while. I didn’t like to go out, didn’t shower, and didn’t pick up the phone except to call my office with elaborate excuses. The smell of my body became comforting, a ripe presence, nasty but familiar. I lay in bed telling myself that it was just a phase, it would pass. Eventually the bulb on my halogen lamp burned out and after two days of darkness I ventured out to buy a new one. The sunlight on the street did something to my brain, or maybe it was the kind bald man who sold me the bulb. I went back to work.

So how are you? How’s Neil?

Oh, we broke up, she said. We had a big fight. He couldn’t see that I was right and he was wrong. It was high drama, in a restaurant with people watching, us screaming and stuff, and this fat waitress pushing between us using her tray as a shield and telling us to leave. So we finished it outside on the street, I made my points, one-two-three, and did my closing arguments. If we were in court, I would have won.

I’m sorry, I said. Why didn’t you tell me right away?

Oh, I didn’t want you feeling bad for me. I’m glad, really. Small-minded jerk. Did I ever tell you he had all this hair on his back? Gray hair, like a silver-back gorilla.

Yes, well. I don’t know that I’ll be seeing Piotr anymore either.

That’s too bad.

No, it’s not.

That night as I lay in bed I thought of my mother and felt my body for lumps the way she said she felt hers, and I put two fingers to the side of my throat. And I began to think of her and think of an undetected cancer, spreading through her body unnoticed. It began to dawn on me that I had done a very stupid thing.

I thought of her lying in bed beside my father at that moment, oblivious to the black thing that might be growing and thickening inside her, maybe in tough strands, maybe in little grainy bits, like oatmeal. She would avoid thinking about it for another six months or a year or two years; she’d deny it until her skin turned gray and she had tentacles growing out of her mouth and her breasts slid from her body and plopped on the floor like lumps of wet clay. Only when all that happened would she give in and say, Hmmm, maybe something is wrong, maybe I should see a doctor after all.

I lay awake for most of the night.

At one point I got up to use the bathroom, and as I sat on the toilet in the dark I suddenly became convinced that there was something horrible floating in the water below me. I was sure of it. A live rat. Or a length of my own intestines lying coiled and bloody in the bowl. I sat there afraid to turn on the light and look, yet I couldn’t leave the bathroom without looking.

I sat there for half an hour, wracked with indecision. I think I fell asleep for a bit.

And when I finally forced myself to turn on the light, turn around, and look—I was so convinced there would be something floating there that I was horribly shocked, my stomach lurched, to see only the empty toilet.

I went back to work on Tuesday.

Did I miss anything? I asked one of the men.

You were gone? he said.

I didn’t know his name; all the men who worked there looked alike. They were all too loud and had too much spit in their mouths.

I had a cubicle all my own, but I dreamed of an office with a door I could close.

A few days later, my father called. Your mother heard the results from the clinic, he said. The mammogram was fine.

That’s great, I said.

She doesn’t seem happy about it, he said. She’s acting very strange.

Oh, I said.

What’s going on, Lisa? he said. There’s something fishy going on here.

Nothing, I said. Ask your wife, I said. Can I talk to her?

She just dashed out for an appointment, told me to call you. She said you’d be relieved.

Yes.

I’m going to call your sister now, she was waiting to hear. Or do you want to call her?

I’ll do it, I said.

It seemed strange to me then that I would need to call Mitch. It felt like she was right here with me, living in my skin. Why should I have to pick up a phone?

We both went home for Christmas.

Later Mitch visited them.

Then I visited.

Then it was Mitch’s turn again.

When I called home during Mitch’s visit, my father said, Your mother was due for another mammogram, so I sent Lisa with her to make sure she goes.

You mean you sent Mitch, I said. I’m Lisa.

Yes, right. You know who I mean.

A few days later my father called. His voice sounded strained. Your mother talked to the mammography clinic today, he said, but she won’t tell me anything. She’s been in her room, crying. She’s been talking on the phone to your sister for an hour. I guess the doctors found something, but I’ll let you know when we know for sure.

OK.

I hung up and called Mitch.

Hello, she said. She sounded like she was choking on one of her pens.

Mitch, I said. It’s yours, isn’t it?

She sighed and said, It’s ridiculous, but I thought I was doing her a favor, I thought I was sparing her some worry.

You went in for her, didn’t you?

You know, Mitch said, she’s more worried about this than if she was the one. She feels like it’s her lump, like it was meant for her, like she gave it to me somehow.

That’s ridiculous, I said. It was like I was talking to myself.

Although, you know, if it were possible, I would, Mitch said. I mean, if there was somehow a way to magically take a lump out of her breast and put it in mine, I’d do it in a second.

I wish I could do that for you, I said.

Yeah, we could all share it.

One dessert and three forks, I said.

And later, as I sat alone on the floor in the apartment, I thought about being my mother’s daughter and my sister’s sister, and I felt my edges start to bleed a little. I remembered standing in a white room with my breast clamped in the jaws of a humming machine. I imagined the mammogram pictures like lunar landscapes, and I could not remember who had the lump anymore, it seemed we all did, and then the phone rang again and I picked it up and heard my father call out as he sometimes did: Leah-Lise-Mitch.




nadia (#ulink_a86d405f-5078-5c38-87b4-a3b1d5160a0d)


Our friend Joel got one of those mail-order brides. It was all perfectly legitimate: he made some calls, looked through the catalogs, comparison-shopped. He filled out the forms without lying about his income or his height. Where it asked MARITAL STATUS? he wrote Divorced! and When she left me I threw my ring into the sea. “That’s so romantic,” we all said when he did it. “No it wasn’t, it was stupid,” he said. “I could have sold that ring for a lot of money.” We insisted, “No, it’s very romantic.” “Do you think?” “Any woman would want you now,” we said, as we put on bathing suits and diving masks and headed down to the beach.

I’ll call her Nadia. That was not her name, but I’ll call her that to protect her identity. She came from a place where that was necessary. Nadia brings up images of Russian gymnasts. Or is it Romanian? Bulgarian? She had the sad ancient eyes, the strained-back hair, the small knotty muscles. The real Nadia, the famous Nadia, I forget what she did exactly; I have vague memories of her winning a gold medal with a grievous wound, a broken bone, a burst appendix. I think she defected. I picture her running across a no-man’s-land between her country and ours, dressed in her leotard and bare feet, sprinting across a barren minefield where tangles of barbed wire roll about like tumbleweeds and bullets rain down and bounce on the ground like hail.

But our Nadia, Joel’s Nadia, came wrapped as if to prevent breakage in a puffy quilted coat that covered her head to foot. She kept the hood up, the strings drawn tight so all we could see was her snout poking out. She must have been cold when she first came; she stood in his apartment, and wouldn’t take it off, and then went and leaned against the radiator. We were all there to welcome her; we had come bringing beer and wine and flavored vodkas: orange, pepper, vanilla.

It was an old-fashioned radiator and her coat must have been made of some cheap synthetic because it melted to the metal. When she tried to step away and found she couldn’t, she moved in a jerky panicked way that was strangely endearing. Joel tried to help her out of the coat but she wouldn’t let him, she jerked and flailed until the coat ripped open and the filling spilled out. It wasn’t down, it was like some kind of packing material, polystyrene peanuts or shredded paper.

It reminded me—a few months earlier I’d ordered some dishes, and when they came in the mail I found they’d been packed in popcorn, real popcorn. Some companies do this now, I’ve been told, because it’s biodegradable, more environment-friendly. I took out the dishes and wondered if I should eat all that popcorn, but it seemed unsanitary. It might have touched something, I don’t know, at the plant: dust, mouse droppings, the dirty hands of some factory worker. So I threw it away, this big box of popcorn. I still think about it. Probably that box could have fed Nadia’s whole family for a week.

Joel and Nadia had written to each other, their letters filtered and garbled by interpreters. They described themselves: hair, eyes, height, weight, preferences in food, drink, animals, colors, recreations. She could speak English but not write it; they had a few phone conversations. What could they possibly have talked about? What did she say? It was enough to make him pay the money, buy the tickets, sign the papers to bring her over the ocean.

These days, ever since her arrival, Joel looked happy. He had a sheen. Someone had cleaned the waxy buildup from his ears. We asked if she was different from the women here, if she had a way of walking, an extra flap of skin, a special smell. Did she smell of cigarettes, patchouli, foreign sewers, unbathedness?

“I think she has some extra bones in her spine,” he said. “She seems to have a lot of them. Like a string of beads. A rosary.”

We’d seen more of her by then, up close, coatless. Her hair was bright red, black at the roots, which gave her head the look of a tarnished penny.

“Tell us something about her,” we said.

He closed his eyes. “When I take off her shirt,” he said, “her breasts jump right into my hands, asking to be touched.”

He opened his eyes to see how we took that.

“Her nipples crinkle up,” he said, “like dried fruit. Apricots.”

“She has orange nipples?”

We’d always insisted that Joel be completely open with us, tell us everything and anything he would tell a male friend. How could we advise him unless he told us the truth? Utter frankness, we told him, was the basis of any mature friendship between men and women. He often seemed to be trying to test this theory, prove us wrong. “Frankness will be the death of any good relationship,” he’d say.

Joel was what we called a teddy-bear type, meaning he was large and hairy and gentle. He had a short soft beard all around his mouth so you could not see any lips. Hair grew in two bristly patches on the back of his neck. His fingertips were blunt and square, his eyes set far back in his head so that they were hard to read. His knees were knobby and full of personality, almost like two pudgy faces. In fact, he sometimes drew faces on them, to amuse his soccer team or us. Some of us had been in love with him once, but that was long past. Friendship was more important than any illusions of romance.

Nadia did not smile much. At first we thought it was because she was unhappy. Then she began smirking in an awful closed-lipped way so we thought she didn’t like us. It took us a while to understand that it was her smile. Eventually we discovered the reason: her teeth were amazing, gray and almost translucent, evidence of some vitamin deficiency. When she spoke, air whistled through them, giving her a charming lisp.

She spoke English well enough, with a singsong lilting accent that lifted the end of every word, so that each word sounded as if it ended with a curlicue, a kite tail, a question mark.

She trilled certain consonants. “Lovely,” she said and trilled the V. Trilled the V! Have you ever heard that before? She must have had some extra ridges on her tongue.

She burst into tears at unpredictable times. She needed her own bedroom, so he cleared out his home office for her. We saw her bed, a child-sized cot.

We began to suspect that he had done it all purely out of kindness, that he had wanted to rescue someone and give her a better home, a new life. He wanted to be a savior, not a husband. “Why didn’t he just adopt a child, then?” we asked each other.

I thought, Maybe I should adopt a child. I ought to have one of my own; people are always looking at me and saying “childbearing hips” as if it’s a compliment. But then I think of the rabbit my sister had as a pet when we were little girls. I remember holding him tightly to my chest until he stopped kicking. I was keeping him warm, but when I let go he was limp. We put him back in the cage for our father to find. I still dream of white fur, one sticky pink eye. I worry I might do the same to a baby. I could adopt a bigger one, a toddler. Not too sickly. But what if it doesn’t understand English?

Of course you want to help, but what can you do? We did what we could: we gave money to feed overseas orphans, money for artificial limbs and eye operations; we volunteered at local schools; we took meals to housebound invalids once a month; we passed out leaflets on street corners. A friend of mine volunteers to escort women past the protesters into abortion clinics and has invited me to join her, but it’s never a good day for me. We recycle. We get angry and self-righteous about what we see on the news. When I see a homeless person on the street I give whatever’s in my pocket.

It’s not enough. But what can you do? What can you do?

Joel had a friend, Malcolm, he was always promising to introduce us to. Malcolm worked for some global humanitarian organization. We saw him on television occasionally, reporting from some wartorn, decimated, or drought-stricken place, hospital beds in the background, people missing feet with flies clustered on their eyes, potbellied children washing their heads in what looks like a cesspool. Malcolm was balding but handsome in a weather-beaten cowboy way. His earnest face made you want to reach for your wallet. “That guy, he can relief-effort me any time,” we’d say to Joel. But we hadn’t met him yet. We were beginning to suspect he existed only inside the box and was not allowed out.

As for Nadia: “Where’s she from, exactly?” we asked Joel.

“A bad place,” he said, frowning. “Her village is right in the middle of contested territory, every week a new name. Don’t ask her about it. It makes her sad.”

“All right,” we said, but privately we wondered at his protecting her feelings like that. No one we knew had ever stopped talking about something because it made us sad. No one. Not even Joel. Was it because we were fat happy Americans, incapable of real sadness? Was it because he thought we had no feelings, or because he thought we were strong enough to bear sadness? Unlike poor delicate Nadia with her pink-rimmed eyes, Nadia who bought her clothes in the children’s department because she had no hips. She said she did it because the clothes were sturdier, better quality, would last longer.

Last longer? How much longer will she need green corduroy overalls, or narrow jeans with unicorns embroidered on the back pockets? How much longer before her hips swell and her legs thicken and her collarbone stops sticking out in that unbecoming way?

Her legs are not like American legs; they are pieces of string, flimsy and boneless.

“We’ll take her shopping,” we told Joel. “We’ll show her the ropes.”

“She’s doing just fine,” he said. “I’ll take her.”

I said, “You should be careful. I’ve heard, people like her, the first time they go to an American supermarket, they have seizures or pass out.”

“Why?” he said.

“They just can’t take it,” I said. “They’re not used to it. The … the abundance or something. Overstimulation.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. Nadia stood at the other end of the room, before a window, so that sunlight set her hair afire and shone right through her pink translucent ears. Her ankles were crossed, her arms folded, a cigarette hung from her fingers. The skin on her face, her arms, was so milky-white her ears didn’t seem to belong to her. Around her people moved in shadows.

“Do you know,” he said, “she lets me hold her hand. In public? Just walking down the street? All the time.”

He was beginning to talk like her, question marks in the wrong places.

“I love her,” he said, in a stupid way. He was talking like one of his moony students. There was something black floating in his drink, next to the ice cube, and he didn’t even notice.

“How do you hold hands?” I said. “Like this?”

“Well … no,” he said. “Usually.… I take her by the wrist. Or grab her thumb. But she doesn’t pull away. She lets me. She likes it.”

“Like this?” I said. “Or like this?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Her wrist is so little, my fingers go right around … like this, see, only hers are even smaller. I can hold them both in one hand.”

His palm was the same, still warm and damp, fingers long and blunt-tipped, hair on the backs. The hair almost hid the new wedding ring. There were bulgy things in the breast pockets of his shirt. The toe of my shoe was almost touching the toe of his. I wondered if she would look up and see us holding hands like this.

But she didn’t. She was absorbed in her cigarette, her halo of sunlight.

Joel was a high school teacher. He loved kids. People always said that about him, first thing: “He loves kids. Such a nice guy” We had always thought it was a wonderful thing about him; it meant he was caring, he was generous, he was nurturing, he was fun. He would be a terrific father. He taught chemistry; he coached the soccer team. He had won the Teacher of the Year plaque three different times. Kids came to him in tears, they trusted him that much, and he’d let them cry through a box of Kleenex and keep his mouth shut and the classroom door open, and then hand them over to the proper counselor or police officer or health-care worker. There had never been a bit of trouble. Not with the girls, not with anyone.He had perfected the art of the friendly distance, the arm’s-length intimacy. We had always known his girlfriend or wife would never have reason to worry about cheerleaders or teen temptresses. Joel was better than that.

At least, we had never suspected anything of him until he brought home this child bride, who must have weighed half of what he did, who sometimes wore her hair in two long braids. Then we had to wonder. Before, we liked to hear him talk about his students. Now there was something off about it, a sour note. “My kids,” he would say. “I love those kids. Do you know what they did? Stephanie Riser and Ashley Mink? Listen.…”And we would listen, but there was something tainting it now, a thin black thread.

“Don’t you think she’s a little too young?” we said.

“Nadia? No! She’s thirty-three.”

“No!” we said.

‘Yes,” he said, looking pleased.

“She must be lying,” we said. “She can’t be.”

“It’s right on her papers,” he said.

“As if that proves anything,” we said. But we said it nicely.

They bought a house together. What does that mean? He bought the house. It was his money. She contributed nothing. What did she do with herself all day? “She makes me happy,” Joel said. Her?

“She’s trained as a doctor,” he said. “She has to pass a test before she can practice here.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“It’s a source of great frustration. She has to relearn things she studied years ago, chemistry, anatomy, in a new language. You should see the size of these books.”

“Are you going to have children?” we asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

But there was no sign of them. So we kept asking.

“Of course,” he said.

“Later.

“Maybe.

“I don’t know.”

Of course we were really asking something else. We wondered if she had her own bedroom in the new house. But of course we couldn’t ask.

“He seems frustrated,” we told one another. “Yes, definitely. Bottled up.”

One of our old friends was chosen to be on a televised game show. We had a party to watch her and invited Joel and Nadia. We screamed when we saw her, taking her place among flashing lights and boldly punching her buzzer. But by the third question, a sweaty sheen had broken out above her upper lip. She faltered, mumbled, and in seconds she had disappeared forever. It was hard to work up any kind of real feeling; it was just dots on a screen. Only a game.

Joel seemed distracted. Nadia stared at the wall and then got up to use the bathroom.

“You have no idea what she’s been through,” Joel said, apropos of nothing. “You have no idea.”

Which is unfair; we have all known suffering, we have all known loss. Certainly I have, and Joel should have known that better than anyone.

The sun going behind clouds, trees creaking in the wind. The house Joel bought was all windows, making it easier for the weather to force its mood upon them. That’s how I explain the gloom. It was a sunless winter. She decorated the house herself, everything backward: hung rugs on the walls, stood dishes on their rims on the shelves, set table lamps on the floor, left the windows bare but hung curtains round the beds. She used a lot of red for someone so lacking in color.

Whenever we visited now she’d be listening to her own music. She’d found a station, way at one end of the AM dial, that played her type of thing. She’d play it for us if we asked her, to be polite. Horns and bells, nasal voices, songs like sobbing. More often, she’d listen to it on the headphones he’d given her, and he’d talk to us. It was easier this way. She sat among us with a blissful look on her face, and we could talk about her without worrying that she’d hear us.

We saw her country on the news sometimes. Shaky camera, people running. Trucks. Shouting. Crowds of people pulling at one another. Are they using black-and-white film, or is everything gray there? She refused to watch.

“Is she afraid she’ll see someone she knows? Does she want to block it all out? Does she still have family back there?”

“I don’t know,” Joel would say. We could no longer tell when he was lying.

“She doesn’t talk about her family?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s angry at them. Maybe they sold her to the mail-order people and took the money.”

“Maybe,” he said, in the way that meant he was not listening at all.

We could not get the picture out of our heads: Nadia ripped from the arms of … someone. By … someone. That part is hazy. We see the hands reaching out, Nadia crying silently. Women with kerchiefs on their heads weeping, men with huge mustaches looking stern, children hugging her knees. Nadia’s chin upraised, throat exposed, martyr light in her eyes. Her shabby relations counting the money and raising their hands to the heavens in thanks, the starving children already stuffing their mouths with bread. It would make a nice painting, Nadia standing among shadows and grubby faces with a shaft of light falling on her, the way it always does no matter where she stands.

Then again, maybe we’ve seen too many movies. “How do we know her family got the money?” I said. “Maybe she came here to get rich. Maybe she’s the gold digger. Maybe she thought high school teachers make a lot of money.”

I thought he’d be more willing to talk about it alone, without the others. I left work in the afternoon and went to his high school. I found him grading papers with a student sitting on his desk. She was sucking on a lollipop, swinging her legs, looked like a twenty-five-year-old pretending to be fifteen, her tiny rear just inches from Joel’s pen (purple; he said red was too harsh). She knocked her heels against the desk and he looked up.

“To what do I owe this?” he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the inside corners of his eyes. Heavy indentations marked the sides of his nose. His fingers left purply smudges. Ink and exhaustion had bruised his face like a boxer’s. The classroom had the sweaty gym-socks-and-hormones smell of all high schools. On top of that there was an aggressively floral smell that was coming off the girl and a stale, musty, old-man sort of smell that, I realized, was coming from Joel.

“Sondra,” he said, “go wait for your bus outside.”

“Okay, Mr. J,” she said, and slowly got up and fixed her skirt and sauntered out. Her bare thighs left two misty marks on the desk.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I said, tracing them with my finger.

“You have to know how to handle these kids,” he said. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get your goat, and the best thing to do is ignore them.” He wrote an X on a student’s paper, then scribbled over the X, then circled it, then wrote sorry in the margin.

“I still think—”

“They get bored in five minutes and do something else. Half these kids have ADD. They have the attention span of a fly.”

“I wanted to talk to you about—”

“What? What was that?” He’d gone back to his grading.

If you looked at those few square inches of skin on the nape of his neck, the backs of his ears, you could almost imagine little-boy Joel. A vulnerable angle, looking down at his hunched shoulders and thinning hair. On the desk in front of him, next to a jar full of pens and highlighters, was a tiny snapshot of Nadia set in an oval ceramic frame. The picture was too small and blurry to make out her face. A gesture, that’s all it was, having that photo there, nothing more. Joel’s hands stopped moving. A flush moved along his scalp. He waited.

It’s not a good time, I said, or thought, and left.

Clearly, he was upset. I was worried. We were all worried about Joel. His clothes were limp. He drooped. He yawned constantly. “Is it Nadia?” we said. At first he ignored us. We kept asking. Finally he nodded.

Just as we thought. She was abusing him, demanding things, running him ragged. We knew she had it in her. It’s the quiet shy ones who are the hardest inside. And Joel was too kind; of course he would give in to her. All she had to do was find his sensitive spots and pinch him there. We knew where they were. She could probably find them. They were not hard to find.

But no, he said. He said it wasn’t like that at all. “She’s sad,” he said, “about something. She won’t tell me. It’s killing me to see her so miserable.”

We worried. Why shouldn’t we? He was our friend. We’d known him for a long time, long enough to see changes in him, long enough to still see the face of younger-Joel embedded in the flesh of older-Joel. We had known him when his pores were small, his hair thick, and his body an inverted triangle rather than a pear. Of course we worried. We had a right to.

Joel was lucky to have us. Men need female friends; they need our clear-sightedness, our intuition. And certainly women need male friends as well. The ideal male friend is one you’ve slept with at some point in the past—that way there’s no curiosity, no wondering to taint the friendship.

Joel would not do it, he was too kind to deal with her. We took it upon ourselves. On a day when we knew he was coaching “his kids” at a soccer match, we went to the house. Nadia let us in, offered to make tea. She seemed no more dejected than usual. She was wearing enormous furry slippers shaped like bunnies, her narrow ankles plunged deep in their bellies. Perhaps she was accustomed to wearing dead animals on her feet. She shuffled across the floor, raising a foot to show us. “Funny, no?” she said.

Funny. No.

We sat her down and gave her a talking-to. She kicked off the slippers and sat cross-legged on the sofa, and we gathered around her, holding her hands, knees, shoulders, and got right to it.

“Why are you making Joel unhappy?” we asked her.

“I don’t,” she said. “I make him tea, I make him dinner, I make his bed. I don’t make him unhappy.”

“What’s the trouble,” we asked her. “Are you homesick?”

The end of her nose was turning pink. It was easier than we’d expected.

“You can tell us,” we said. “Tell us anything. Need a shoulder to cry on? A hand to hold? Let it out. Have a good cry.” She kept her head still but her eyes darted back and forth.

“What about children?” we asked. “Don’t you want children?”

“We want children.”

“Joel wants children.”

“Joel wants children.”

“But you don’t.”

“No.…”

“You can’t?”

“No!”

“Are you trying?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t want to have a child?”

“I have child!” she said. She twisted away from us and went to take the teakettle off the stove. We wanted to press further, but we thought she’d said enough. By the time she returned with cups and spoons and the teapot on a tray, we were gathered at the door ready to leave. She carried the tray so easily, she must have had some waitressing experience in her past, we agreed, as we headed up the street. We must have imagined the shatter and skid of china somewhere in the dark house behind us.

Of course we told Joel, and he got it all out of her in his gentle, imploring way. Nadia had a twelve-year-old daughter back in … wherever it was. (I looked it up—one of those places with the devious names that sound nothing like they’re spelled.) Joel told her over and over, he told us over and over, that she shouldn’t have kept it from him, that of course he would welcome her daughter as his own.

Outside of Nadia’s hearing, he hissed that he was furious with us, with what he termed our interfering. Interfering! We’d done it for his own good. For the good of both of them. Frankness, we reminded him, was the basis of any good relationship.

We thought he would want to know what kind of woman his wife really was. How could she do such a thing? Leave her own daughter behind?

Joel didn’t mention—though we suspected he brooded over—the fact that a daughter meant there was a father. Dead? An ex-husband? A current husband? A boyfriend past or present? All men are jealous, even men like Joel. They don’t get jealous the same way women do, but they get jealous all the same.

“We’re going to bring her over,” he told us.

“Who, you?”

“Nadia can’t go; she won’t be able to get out again. I’m going.”

“By yourself?”

“Malcolm can help, maybe,” he said.

“What are you going to do, just go over there and snatch the kid?”

“There must be a legal way to do it,” he said. “And if not.…”

Joel had never been the type to make threats; we were almost inclined to laugh. But now look at him, pounding his fist into his hand, throwing back his shoulders, glaring as if looking for a fight. She had changed him, she had been riding him after all, but in a more insidious way than we’d suspected. She must have sulked and whined and prodded and provoked him into charging back to her backwoods hometown to rescue her brat. Her daughter, whom we imagined as a miniature, even more doll-like version of Nadia.

We still didn’t believe it. Out of those girls’-size-twelve hips? Such a tight squeeze. We pictured a blue and dented baby among gray hospital linen.

Her body—too ungenerous to nurture anything; husband, child. Not like ours. Me, I stand in front of the mirror sometimes, squeezing here and there hard enough to leave pink fingerprints. I imagine people taking bites, here and here and here. I could feed a family of five for a week.

Perhaps Joel’s resoluteness had something to do with the phantom father—perhaps out of jealousy, or out of chivalry, he wanted to track the man down, see him face-to-face. And then what? We liked the idea of it—Joel as hero avenger, toting the twelve-year-old under his arm and facing down a dark-faced stranger—but we couldn’t quite make it work. The picture in our heads looked like Joel manhandling one of his students, getting too rough on the kickball field, overstepping the bounds of discipline. Setting himself up for a lawsuit. The “he’s such a nice guy” refrain would be replaced with “but he seemed like such a nice guy.”

We thought Joel was all bluster, but he did it. He made plans; he bought tickets. Had to get special permission, made shady arrangements. Bought six pairs of Nikes, a dozen pairs of blue jeans. “Gifts.” How did he know what size to get? Sunglasses and a money pouch that strapped around his waist.

I went by the house when he was packing to lend him my kit of outlet adapters. So many different configurations of prong and hole. Neither of us knew which he would need.

“Take them all,” I said. My hands were overflowing. We were alone in the bedroom, suitcase splayed over the bed. I said, “It doesn’t bother you that she has a child? That she loved someone else? Maybe she still thinks about him.”

“She left, didn’t she?” he said. “Everyone deserves a second chance.” He was using the voice he used with his students, brightly chiding.

“Second chance?” I said. “Everyone?”

He walked to the other side of the bed and very studiously folded a T-shirt into a perfect square. “You know, what do I need all these plugs for, anyway? A hair dryer? An electric razor?” He tugged at his beard, just in case I didn’t get it. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

I passed Nadia in the hallway. “Tea?” she said.

“What?” I said. “What? Enunciate, please.”

He went. He left Nadia behind, in the drafty house, which seemed colder than ever in the spring chill. We visited her again; we kept her company in twos and threes; we watched television with her while she listened to her earphones. We noticed bruises on her arms—on her ribs once when she was taking off her sweater and her undershirt rode up. Splotches like handprints. We didn’t ask; we figured she was anemic. It would make sense; she must have grown up malnutritioned. I’ve heard about people like that, they bruise so easily that sitting in a chair leaves them black and blue. You can bruise them by breathing on them.

We didn’t know what Joel was doing over there. He probably didn’t call Nadia either. She showed us a picture of her daughter, but it was an old Polaroid and too faded for us to make out the features. A bleached ghost, with a cat clearly visible in the darkened doorway beyond. Cat’s eyes were red. The ghost’s shoes were untied. Surely, if it was her daughter, she would have tied them before taking the picture? Later we heard that Joel had been befriending journalists, bribing locals, sneaking into places he wasn’t supposed to be.

Of course we saw it on the news, the ugly things that were happening over there, but we didn’t really think that Joel was in the midst of it. There’s a small part of me that wonders if what we see on the news isn’t real, if it’s fabricated, re-enacted. I swear it’s the same shabby group of refugees each time, same line of tanks, the same bandaged heads, even the same flies. Same barbed-wire fences, same hand-dug grave and sloppily wrapped corpse. Same corn-fed private telling the camera he can’t wait to get home to his baby daughter. Same concluding shot of a child’s toy crushed in a soldier’s muddy bootprint. It’s as if all the TV stations are borrowing the same bunch of actors.

Oh, I don’t really think that. I know those things are really happening. I mean, I know now.

We might never have known what happened—Joel would never have told us—if a photojournalist hadn’t been there and snapped a picture. And so Joel had to explain—we read the quotes in the newspapers—how he (and Malcolm, the mysterious Malcolm) had talked to people who sent them to a particular neighborhood where they’d seen the girl on a deserted street and thought she was the right one. Something about the shape of a hand, the tentative, up-on-the-toes walk, the translucent ears? I don’t know. He wasn’t thinking, he said, he just rushed out and grabbed her and then the shooting started.

He said he didn’t know about the snipers on the rooftops, he said he thought the street was deserted. He didn’t realize people were hiding behind locked doors and boarded windows, waiting in their homes, afraid to go out. He didn’t know that only children were sent out to do errands, because a child, being smaller, might have a better chance of dodging bullets. They might not shoot a child.

He said that when he ran out into the street he only wanted to bring the girl home, and when the shooting started he only wanted to protect her. He said he was trying to keep her out of the line of fire, trying to block the bullets. But it’s clear from the photograph, in which he’s looking to one side and gripping to his chest a bundle of hair and dress and dangling legs, that he’s using her body to shield his own.

We saw the photograph, read about it. There’s a dark wet spot on the little girl’s back, you can see Joel’s wedding ring, you can see how bushy his beard’s grown. He’s wearing a hat we’d never seen before, and though the eyes are a smudge you can see his mouth hanging open, slack, completely unmoored.

We wanted to tell Nadia, couldn’t tell Nadia. It wasn’t really our place, we decided. We lacked the vocabulary. I doubt Joel called her. What would he say? She found out somehow, I suppose there were people she could call, family, friends, I suppose she’s not as alone as she seems.

He came back eventually. Returned to the States, that is. He didn’t come to see any of us. We heard he came back without the daughter. Was that because he didn’t find her? Or was that her, the girl in the photograph? It couldn’t be. We told each other that, most likely, he had found the girl, and she’d taken one look at this huge foreign-talking man and decided to stay where she was. Probably she’s happier with her father, we told each other. Probably she has a whole family of her own. We pictured a father, now, who was a counterpoint to Joel: small, graceful, clean-shaven, stouthearted.

Joel avoided us. Fine. We didn’t want to know what he’d brought back with him. Infection. Those diseases they have over there. Odorous invasions of the skin and digestion, diseases of neglect. The ones the travel books warn you about.

I wonder what that’s like. There have been times when I’m sure I’m dying: when my heart flutters in the middle of the night for no reason, when a loneliness or craving is so strong it nauseates me—but of course I’m not. I wonder if living close to the edge of desperation like that makes you feel more alive. It’s a cliché, I know, but most clichés have a core of truth, don’t they? One time I tried to ask Nadia about it—whether she’d felt more alive back there in her homeland with death all around. She didn’t seem to understand the question. She didn’t see a difference between there and here. As if for her it was all the same: Life was perilous everywhere, a teetering tightrope walk from one minute to the next.

We wondered what would happen to Joel and Nadia. Surely they couldn’t go on together? How could he explain it? Even if it wasn’t her daughter, how could he have done such a thing? She wouldn’t be able to stay with him. How could she? She might even go back. Maybe she’d realize that her kind of people demand a sort of heroism she won’t find here.

We felt certain Joel wouldn’t have hidden behind the bodies of our hypothetical daughters. He would have taken a bullet, rather. We all knew this. Nadia and her kind were different, they counted less. They were one degree closer to being objects, to his mind. He might deny it, but actions speak louder, don’t they? In moments of panic, the true self comes to the surface.

And she had abandoned her own daughter. How could they stay together, knowing these ugly truths about each other? So much for frankness.

To be rid of Nadia. Hadn’t that been the intent all along? No one wanted to say it outright, but I will. Yes, it was. But now the prospect of a solitary Joel was no longer appetizing. We knew that, despite the avoidance, Joel was in need of our friendship and pity, probably for the first time. But now we didn’t feel like giving it to him; we wanted to lavish it on someone more worthy.

Suddenly, we didn’t want Nadia to leave.

“Have you seen Nadia?” we asked each other. “He doesn’t let her out,” we said. “He’s holding her hostage in that miserable house.”

We organized a rescue mission. “We’ll break the door down if we have to,” we said. Of course we didn’t have to. Joel opened the door with bowed head. “Where is she?” we said, pushing our way in. We were momentarily distracted; Joel looked like he might tolerate, for once might even welcome, a hug or a kiss on the cheek. We steeled ourselves and pressed on.




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