Battleborn: Stories (13 page)

Here we are in my bedroom, just come home from a concert. We are made of clay and our limp limbs are clandestinely pinned in place with toothpicks. We’ve been to see a band whose music was frantic and heartsick and whose lead looked so much older than the last time either of us had seen them that we couldn’t help but grow a little older ourselves as we listened.

Dawn is pressing lightly to the cellophane window beside the bed. My yarn hair is tangled, and if you look closely you can see a slight sweat sheen on us both. I am lying on my back on the handkerchief bedspread, wearing tall red heels that have been hurting my feet. They are Barbie shoes painted with careful strokes of ruby nail polish. Ezra sits at the foot of the bed with my foot in his lap. He is bent over, unclasping the tiny-toothed buckle at my ankle. When he is finished with this shoe he’ll remove the other, then run a finger softly over the place where that strap cut into my ankle. His hands will cup the belly of my calf, make their way up underneath my dress. We’ll make love. Afterward he’ll say, I know I’m a pain in the ass. I’m sorry
.
I’ll kiss his chest and say, Tell me you’ll be true. I can’t, he’ll say. You know that
.
But in the diorama he hasn’t said this yet. In the diorama we are frozen, his head bent, his sweet mouth gathered in concentration, his ossified clay fingers fumbling softly at my aluminum-foil buckle. I call it
Man Removes Shoe
.

In this one, we are papier-mâché in a restaurant alongside the Truckee. We sit at a dollhouse table on a Popsicle-stick patio stretching over a river of blue and green tissue paper, its crinkled rapids daubed white with foam. A shapely decanter of red wine stands in the center of the table, near empty. We have ordered a meal consisting entirely of appetizers. See the card-stock plates crowding the table. See the remnants of colored-pencil anchovies, prosciutto, bruschetta, oysters, soft white cheese coated with candied nuts, a gutted half round of once-warm bread. We smoke cigarettes rolled from wisps of cotton, and his fingers are sunk deep into my hair of soft felt. He is openmouthed, laughing that laugh of laughs. I am thinking, I would do anything to make you laugh
.
I call it
Us at Our Best.

•   •   •

I
hadn’t talked to Ezra in six weeks, and I hadn’t had my period in at least eight. I took a test, then another. I called Carly.

When I told her she said, “That’s fantastic!” and meant it.

I said, “Go fuck yourself.”

When Carly came over that night I was in the bathtub and had been for some time. She set the Miracle on the floor. The turnip sprout was ornamented with a blue velvet bow that perfectly matched her blue velvet dress.

I handed the Miracle the cardboard core of a toilet paper roll, which she accepted grudgingly and inserted into her mouth. “Is that her birthday outfit?” I asked, though I knew it was. I’d been at the party.

Carly said, “Have you told him yet?”

“Please don’t start in on me.”

“You need to.”

“Why? I know exactly how it’s going to go: ‘We fucked up.’ ‘Oops. Here’s four hundred dollars.’”

“He won’t say that. He’s a good person.”

“No, he’s not. And I know you know that.” I reached for a peanut butter cup. “You should be ashamed of yourself, contributing to the romantic delusions of an unmarried woman with child.”

She leaned down and placed her hand under the Miracle’s chin. She said, “May I have that?” The baby allowed a wet shred of cardboard pulp to drop from her mouth to her mother’s palm. Carly said, “Thank you,” and the Miracle said, “Thank you!” Carly recrossed her legs and looked around.

“No wine tonight,” she said. “No cigarettes. No pot. That’s a good sign.”

“It doesn’t mean what you think.”

“Tell him first, Nat. It’s the right thing to do.”

I sat up in the tub and extended my hand to my niece. I wanted her to grab hold of my index finger, wield for me some of that heartening babystrength. I wiggled my fingers at her. She regarded my hand and went on gnawing the tube, perturbed. The Miracle has dignity bordering on cruelty.

“I’m waiting,” I said.

“For what?” asked Carly.

I eased back into the water. “I want there to be something else to say.”

•   •   •

I
used to tell Ezra that I knew no man’s touch before his, that I was conjured up on this Earth for him, my virgin flesh materializing among the video poker machines in the back of that bar on Fourth in the same heavenly instant he walked through the door. We used to laugh about this. But before Ezra there was Sam. Poor, good Sam.

Sam and I once had a baby, technically. He wanted to have it and I didn’t. Sam said he would support me, whatever I decided, which he did. Of course he did. This was maybe three months before I met Ezra and left Sam for him.

Sam sat in the waiting room for six hours. That’s how long it takes, though the procedure itself lasts less than ten minutes. He and I arrived at the facility early in the morning, as we’d been instructed. The building was unmarked and located across from the Meadowood Mall, on the Sears side. We were buzzed in through two sets of bulletproof doors. In the waiting room Sam hugged me, then kissed me, then hugged me again. I went back and joined the other women.

All of them were white and teenagers or close to it, younger than me anyway, except one, who was black and considerably older, forty or forty-five. I was the last to arrive, and I’d passed all those teenage girls’ fathers in the waiting room. There wasn’t a mother in the whole place.

Except for when she was summoned by a nurse, the black woman talked on her cell phone ceaselessly. To a friend, I gathered. Not the father. She narrated everything we did. I hated her for this. I felt protective of the younger girls, perhaps, though I did nothing to act on this feeling. But her insipid narrating soothed me a little, too, because it had the effect of casting the facility in a less exceptional light, like the lobby of a bank or a chiropractor’s office, not a place where one looked for some kind of meaning, which it was certainly not. I thought this was good for the younger girls to see.

The black woman told how one by one we all filled out a stack of paperwork and got blood tests and watched a video regarding our rights. She read aloud the Adrienne Rich quote on a poster in the room where we waited. She repeated the selection of pain medication offered to us on a tiered scale. For an extra hundred dollars we would be provided two substantial caplets of Vicodin. For a hundred and fifty we could be outfitted with a mask delivering a dose of nitrous oxide, which, we were told, smelled and tasted a little like bubble gum and would render us barely conscious during the procedure. These offerings, we were informed, could not be combined, but they were included in addition to a local anesthetic, which we would each receive at no extra cost, and which would be injected directly into the cervix immediately before the procedure. We were invited to consider these options in light of our individual needs and our budgets. Of course, if we wished, we were free to choose none at all. I chose none. I told myself it was because I was broke. At the time I mistook suffering for decency.

The black woman told whoever how one by one we all got Pap smears and pelvic exams. How the staff did an ultrasound on each of us, and asked if we wanted a copy of what we saw there. I said I did, mostly because the heavy woman operating the device seemed so pleased to be able to offer it. In the image there were white brackets around a dark space. That’s all. Later, I put it in my glove box and did not look at it again. I never showed the image to Sam, though I knew what it would have meant to him. Being with Sam was like standing atop a small hill and seeing my whole fine life unfurled in front of me like prairie.

The procedure itself lasted under ten minutes, a fact that the nurses often reiterated and that proved technically accurate but did little to capture the character of those ten minutes. A nurse’s aide held my hand. I envisioned Sam sitting out with the fathers. I wondered unkindly whether his presence deflated them. How, I wondered, did they reconcile the facility waiting room with a white, college-educated, clean-shaven twenty-six-year-old—the kind of man their now-wayward daughters would bring home one day, if they turned things around? Later, Sam told me he wouldn’t have been in the waiting room then. He went for a walk, he said, though there was nowhere to walk really, so he just weaved up and down the rows of cars in the mall parking lot, waiting for me to call.

Afterward, they took us to a room and had us lie on cots. Some of the girls threw up there, including me. The aides gave us apple juice and two cookies for our blood sugar and a prescription for birth control so we wouldn’t be repeat customers. I have told this story occasionally, to my sister and a few others. But Ezra was the only person who ever laughed at that last part. Another reason why I loved him, I suppose. Anyway, the whole experience was as awful as one would expect, and no more so. It was nothing I couldn’t do again.

This was why my sister came every night, and why she brought the Miracle.

•   •   •

A
fter she left with the Miracle in her birthday getup, Carly called. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Promise you won’t smoke or drink anymore.”

“What for?”

“You never know,” she said buoyantly.

“Actually, Car, the sad thing is how often you do know.”

“Come on,” she said. “For me.”

“This is fucked up,” I said; then I promised.

It should have been easy to quit; I’d only ever smoked with him, for him. It wasn’t easy—I was anxious and found I didn’t know what to do with my hands—but I did it. I stopped drinking, too, and took to having lemonade with my peanut butter cups. I read faster, and I became more disturbed by the things I read. Often, I had to stop. I’d set the book aside and look at my naked body. I imagined tumbling through plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche. I distended my stomach so it rose from the surface of the water. It was too early for that, of course. Those cells were barely the size of a cranberry, or so Carly told me. Sometimes I went underwater to see how long I could stay there. I opened my eyes, saw those brownblack wrappers moving above me like his boats, like insects alighted on the surface of the Truckee. I saw him there. I wished I didn’t, but I did.

•   •   •

W
hen Carly was pregnant with the Miracle she tried never to become upset or angry, always to be calm. That was why the Miracle turned out so even. But it seemed all I was was upset and angry. It is such a short distance from the heart to the womb. I could see foul chemicals injecting into Cranberry. What if the first feelings she ever felt were loss and fear and anger? It must sour a person profoundly to have these as first feelings. This is probably what happened to me.

•   •   •

T
he Museum of Love Lost could have a Mother Wing. Arranged in reverse chronological order, it might start with an archive of yellowing newspaper articles:
Fatal Accident Causes Major Power Outage
;
Thousands in Northwest Reno Without Electricity after Car Slams into Power Pole
. (Ezra, when I told him: “I remember that day. We got out of school early.”) From there a visitor might move through a catalogue of all the matchbooks our mother gave Carly and me when she visited us at our grandmother’s in Sun Valley. Carly kept hers in a mason jar on the dresser we shared—booklets from Sparky’s, Bully’s, Crosby’s, little boxes from the Bonanza, the Horseshoe, the Polo Lounge. I burned my matches up as soon as our mother left, not because I wanted to destroy them, but because I couldn’t resist the smell of them burning, or the satisfying snap of those chalky heads against that grainy strip.

There might be pungent tubes of the same variety of henna our mother used to dye our brown hair red when we were girls, back when we still lived with her, because she wanted us to look more like her. Here is a photo of us sitting in the gravel driveway in front of our trailer, our hair swirled high on our heads with the rust-colored clay, letting, she said, the sun do its thing. We are maybe five and ten. I am wearing only white cotton underpants.

The Mother Wing might end with a display of dried, pressed sprigs of sage and wild mint from the drainage ditch behind the trailer, which we used to pick by the armful and bring to our mother while she slept.

But most likely, the Mother Wing would be completely empty.

•   •   •

C
arly came over the next night with the Miracle dressed in a fuzzy brown bear outfit. Small bear ears peeked up from the hood, and soft claw mittens from the arms, and a tail on the ass wiggled bearlike as she crawled.

“Why is she wearing that?” I asked.

“She likes it,” Carly said. “Watch this.” She asked the Miracle, “Who’s a bear?”

The Miracle bared her newest teeth and dropped her mother’s cell phone to display her claws. “Who’s a bear?” Carly said again.

The Miracle squealed, snapped her teeth together and then roared a too-happy roar.

“That’s adorable,” I said, and it was.

Carly looked pleased. She said, “Maybe you should get out of the bath.”

“Some days I thank God I can lock myself in my apartment and no one has to be around me,” I said. “What if I always have those days? A baby is there. All the time.” These things were just occurring to me.

“Have you thought any more about that docent program?” she said. “I could still get you an interview.”

“I’ve already started,” I said, waving her to my nightstand.

“What’s all this?”

“Don’t touch it.”

She hovered over the things Ezra had emptied from his pockets our last night together. They were arranged on the nightstand just as he’d left them, waiting to be labeled and mounted on acid-free paper: a credit card receipt from a bar up the street. The chewed cap of a pen. Some change and a five-dollar bill creased in the middle like an accordion, which he used for a trick where he’d make it look like Abraham Lincoln was smiling or frowning, depending on how he held it. A near-empty sack of tobacco.