“I have to tell you, I don’t know anything about construction.”
“Ever used a hammer?”
“Well, sure.”
“Then you know something about construction.”
I look around the room. Thick sheets of plastic for a roof and walls. Sawhorses, a circular saw resting on one of them. Stacks of lumber, boxes of ceramic tile. Huge quantities of long nails. Large pieces of plywood. Piles of sawdust, a space heater that’s doing a great job keeping the place warm. “So. What do you want me to do?”
“First thing is a coffee break,” Mark says. “You like cranberry muffins?”
“Yes, I do.”
He opens a bag, spreads out a napkin on boards over a sawhorse, sets out two muffins. Then he opens a thermos and pours two cups of coffee into paper cups. “It’s got milk in it,” he says. “That’s what me and my partner like.”
“That’s fine.”
“No sugar.”
“Perfect.”
“What we’re doing is a kitchen/family room,” he says. “And what I’m working on today is the roof and the window frames. I need you to take a shitload of nails out of some plywood that I’m going to reuse on the roof. That’ll be the first thing. Okay?”
“Fine.”
“Then I’ll need you to take my truck and run an errand. Go down to the lumberyard and pick up some supplies. You just tell them my name, and they’ll load you up.”
“Okay.” I finish my muffin in two huge bites, gulp down the coffee. “I’m ready.”
“You’re going to work out fine,” Mark says, grinning. He turns on a radio splattered with paint. “You like country and western?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You got to hear country and western when you’re working construction.”
I watch as he shows me how to take the nails out: hammer on the pointed ends until they’re almost all the way out; then turn the board over and pry them out by the heads. Put them in the plastic bucket—save them.
I work on this for two hours, then say I’m finished. He comes down, looks at the boards that I’ve stacked neatly in the corner. “Good.” He looks at me, nods. “Come over here, I’ll teach you to build a header. That’s what goes along the top of the window, to support the weight of the roof.”
He lays out two boards of uneven length, tells me to align them at one end, then nail them together. “Here, and here,” he says, indicating where the nails should go. “Avoid the knotholes.” I look around nervously. “Are the owners here?”
“Shit, no. Ain’t nobody home anymore. People hire me to do these beautiful things to their houses and then they’re never in them.” He hands me a nail. “This is a tenpenny bright,” he says. “Drive it, girl.”
I place the nail, tap tentatively at it.
“Use your shoulder,” Mark says. “Get your weight into your swing. And stand off to the side a little.”
I do as he tells me and the nail makes its way a good third of the way in. I look up, a little thrilled.
“That’s right,” he says.
I pound again. It feels so good.
“Sink it!” Mark says, and I do.
“I’m not going to tell you what I was thinking while I did that,” I say, straightening, my hands on my hips.
“You don’t have to,” he says, and hands me another nail.
It was nothing about David, what I was thinking. It was about me. I was thinking, “I! Am! Worth! Something!”
Mark climbs the ladder, and I finish nailing the boards together. When I’m through, he looks down and says, “See that? You just built a header.”
I take a breath. Nod. Nod again.
“Now go and get the keys to my truck, they’re in my jacket,” Mark says. “Then go to National Lumber—you know where it is?”
I do know. I’ve driven past it many times, and I tell Mark this.
“All right. Go on over there and tell them you need what I called about this morning. And then we’ll have lunch.”
“Burger King?” I say.
“Is that what you like?”
“I thought that’s what you guys ate all the time.”
“I like those tofu roll-ups,” Mark says. “But I could do a Whopper.”
WE SIT AT a small table by the window at Burger King. Mark is telling me about the time he got kicked out of his Catholic school for falling in love with a nun.
“Are you serious?” I ask.
He nods. “She was real young. And I saw one day that there were all these little hairs escaping from her wimple. I thought, whoa! that’s a woman under there! Before that, I thought they . . . I didn’t really think they were women. I thought they were a kind of separate species.”
“So you saw her hair and fell in love?”
“Well, not right away. What happened was, I was a pretty good artist. And she used to take me outside, up on a hill, and let me draw. And she would just sit with me, read, sometimes she’d read out loud, it was nice. And then one day we started holding hands, hugging a little.” He shrugs. “Kissin’ . . . Anyway, somebody saw us and I got expelled and she got fired. Never saw her again.”
“How old were you?” I ask.
“Twelve.”
“Twelve!”
He takes a sip of his Coke. “Yup. I got a son coming up on twelve now. I look at him sometimes, you know? He doesn’t tell me anything anymore.”
“I know,” I say. “They stop.”
“Right around ten, they start getting pretty quiet.”
“It’s true.”
“Makes you kind of miss the days when they ran around with their pacifiers, their little tummies hanging over their diapers. ’Member that? Those little belly buttons?”
I smile at him. What a good man.
Mark crumples up his bag. “Ready to go back to work?”
“Yeah.” In the truck on the way back, I look at my hands. Two blisters starting. I couldn’t be more proud.
29
“I CAN’T DO THIS STUPID HOMEWORK,” TRAVIS SAYS. “I HATE Mr. Houseman. He’s stupid!”
“Let me see,” I say, and stop peeling potatoes. At the kitchen table, Travis is holding his forehead in his hands, his usual way of conveying anguish.
He looks up at me, frowns. “You’re no good in math!”
“Well, just let me see. And for your information, I got an A in algebra.”
“This is not that,” he says.
And it isn’t. I don’t quite understand what it is. Something close to geometry, though, and I still remember taking my geometry midterm when I was a sophomore in high school. I passed the time by drawing designs for evening gowns on the back of the exam; everything on the front of the page only annoyed me.
“I’m afraid you’re failing this class,” my teacher had told me later, sadly. He was speaking in a very quiet voice. A whisper, really.
“I know,” I had whispered back.
“Why don’t you come in after school a few times a week? I’ll give you a little extra help.”
“Okay,” I’d said, thinking, oh please, no. But I had gone and Mr. Seidel had patiently drawn angles and worked through proofs, explaining at each step what he was doing and why. For my part, I had watched his hand as he wrote, admiring his neat penmanship, looking carefully at his wedding ring, wondering what his wife was like. When he finally looked up and asked me if I understood, I responded with a blank gaze. He’d given me a D– as an act of remarkable kindness.
“Can one of your friends help you?” I ask Travis.
“No.”
“Well, call Dad, then. He’ll know how to do it.”
“He’s on a stupid business trip.”
“Oh. Right. Well, then, I’m sorry, Travis. I don’t know what to tell you. I guess you’ll just have to talk to your teacher tomorrow.” I go back to the potatoes, out of enemy territory. I’m so glad I’m finished with school. If I were told to go home and spend my evening doing homework—in five subjects, no less!—I’d start screaming
.
“Can I call King?” Travis asks.
Of course. Why hadn’t this occurred to me?
“Sure. It’s 247-8893.”
“You know it by heart?”
“Yes,” I say. And then, “I mean, it’s an easy number.”
Travis goes into the family room to make the call. He hates his math class, and I don’t blame him a bit. But he’s going to have to get through it, or he’ll end up like me.
“King knew how to do it,” Travis says, coming back into the kitchen. “It’s easy.”
Well. His spirits have improved.
“What’s for dinner?” he asks. And when I tell him, he doesn’t offer his usual wounded commentary. Yes, his spirits have improved immeasurably.
JUST BEFORE I go to sleep, I rub my hands over my breasts. Pain, on both sides, again. This has been happening a lot, all of a sudden. It can’t be cancer. Cancer doesn’t hurt. Cancer doesn’t show up on both sides. I must be starting to have breast pain when I ovulate. Rita always does. I turn onto my side, burrow into my pillow, think about whether it is time to ovulate. And then I open my eyes wide and lie still as death. I have just figured out my weight gain.
I sit up, slide into my slippers, go downstairs to look at the kitchen calendar with hands that are shaking. No X on any day last month. Or the month before. I press my fingers to my mouth, dry now, sticky. I sit at the table. How could I not have known this? This is exactly what happened with Travis. And I’d been so angry, because everyone else I knew had lost weight the first trimester. Not me. My appetite had been amazing. I’d gained and gained.
I push my face into my hands, moan. But then, hearing the front door open, I compose myself. Edward comes into the kitchen, heads for the refrigerator, then sees me.
“God,” he says. “I just had the date from hell. Remind me tomorrow to kill myself. What a relief to see you.”
Edward is such a pleasant man; I like him so much. He used to be a baby.
I burst into tears.
Edward leaves the refrigerator door open, comes to sit opposite me, takes my hand. “What?” he says. “What happened? Oh God, is it Travis?”
“Not exactly,” I say.
30
“WELL, I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE THIS,” DAVID SAYS. HE IS keeping his voice low; the restaurant is crowded, but I imagine he feels like screaming “How?”
It’s a fair question. I’m not quite sure myself. But, “In the usual way, David,” I hear myself saying. “Sperm meets egg.”
“But aren’t you too old?”
“Apparently not.”
He looks down, stirs the ice in his drink with his fingers. He has such long fingers. I bet this baby has long fingers, too. Travis does. Looking up, David says, “Forgive me. But . . . my sperm, right?”
I sit for a long moment, then say, “No, I don’t believe I do forgive you.” I stand up, reach for my coat.
He takes my arm. “Please. Don’t make this more melodramatic than it already is. We’ll take care of it, that’s all.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I say. And have the curious sensation, pushing the door open to leave, that two people are doing it.
. . .
“OH, GOD,” RITA keeps saying, until I finally say, “Will you stop? Will you stop saying ‘Oh, God’?”
“Well, Sam. This is so unbelievable! I mean, it’s like those teenagers who live in trailers and go to the bathroom one day and deliver. And their whole family’s standing around with their mouths open saying, Goooolllllleee!”
“Thank you for your incredible sensitivity.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I know this is . . . Well, I guess this accounts for some of the craziness you’ve been feeling.”
“Who knows? It seems like divorce can do a pretty good job of that all by itself.”
“True. Oh, poor Sam. The double whammy. When your hormones get back to normal, you’ll probably feel lobotomized. So, when are you going to have it done?”
“What?”
“The abortion.”
“I called.”
“And?”
“And it’s all set. Next week. But, Rita—”
“Don’t even say it.”
“I have to say it. They asked me these questions over the phone and I just started bawling. ‘Any other pregnancies?’ Yeah, I’ve had ‘another pregnancy.’ It turned into Travis.”
“You can’t have it.”
“Why not?”
Silence.
“I’m raising one on my own. Why not two?”
“Oh, man. Do you need me to go with you? I will. I’ll come back out there, we’ll go together. When’s the appointment?”
“You don’t need to come. Thanks, but it’s okay.”
“Who will go with you?”
“They said it’s preferable to bring someone, but you don’t have to. They’ll assign you someone.”
“Great. Rent-a-friend.”
“But I’m not sure. I want to think about this.”
“Don’t think about it. Just do it.”
“You know, Rita, you’re acting like a fucking man. You’re not listening, you’re just telling me what to do. I’m not sure it’s the right thing!”
“Well, fine. But you’d better decide fast.”
“I know that!”
“Okay. Okay. Look. You know I’ll support you in whatever you decide. But I really don’t think now is the time. I mean, come on, do you?”
I don’t answer. When Travis was a newborn, I would go in to nurse him at night and I would raise his T-shirt to watch him breathe. His stomach moved up and down so rapidly it pained me. I would look at his soft spots, afraid of them, see the pulsations from his beating heart. After a few weeks, he would interrupt himself while he was nursing to look up at me and smile, milk running down his chin. And I would tighten my hold on him, renew my vow that nothing would ever, ever hurt him. This is what I want to tell Rita. But I can’t. King is right—the words would only hint at all I mean to say.
“What’s David say?” Rita asks.
“What does David say? Yank it out.”
“Well, that’s a little crude.”
“When I told him, I felt so . . . We didn’t talk much. I wish I hadn’t told him.”
“Why did you?”
“I don’t know.”
Not true. I know. I told him because I wanted his face to soften and for him to say, “Oh, Sam. That’s wonderful. Listen, we’ll work it out. I’m not happy away from you and Travis, this was wrong. Let me move back in.” And then I would not worry about retirement planning, David could do that. And I would not think that I would grow old alone and demented in some filthy apartment with a chair by the window.
“I’ll let you know,” I tell Rita. “I’ll tell you when I know.”
IN THE DREAM, I am standing by a large tree, the bark with a deeply etched pattern like dried earth. Out of one of the cracks a red tulip is growing. A hand is reaching toward it, ready to pick it. “Oh no, don’t,” I say. “Don’t pick it. It’s new life. It’s a miracle.” I awaken, blink in the darkness, close my eyes again.
31
TWO DAYS BEFORE THE APPOINTMENT, I TAKE A DAY OFF FROM work, tell Travis as he is eating breakfast that I’ll be cleaning out his closet today.
“No!” he says, his mouth full of scrambled eggs.
“I have to! You can’t shut the door anymore!”
“I’ll do it,” he says. “You’ll throw everything out!”
“First of all,” I say, “you won’t do it. Secondly, I will not throw everything out.”
“Yeah, just the good stuff.”
“If you would keep your closet clean, then I wouldn’t have to clean it for you. I don’t enjoy cleaning it any more than you do. I’ve told you a hundred times—”
“Oh, don’t give me one of your lectures.”
“Travis, don’t you take that tone of voice with me. I swear to God. Do not speak to me like that again or I’ll slap your face. I have never hit y
ou yet, but I promise you I am entirely capable of it.”
His eyes widen. “Boy. You’re crabby.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I know!”
“Go to school.”
He stands. “I am!”
“Fine.”
“Fine!”
As I watch Travis go out the door, Lavender comes up the basement steps and into the kitchen. “Hi,” she says, her voice croaky with sleep.
“Hi.”
I watch her grab a spoon, then head for the refrigerator and take out a carton of plain yogurt. She sits at the table and pulls off the lid, smells it. “I really hate this stuff.”
“Well, why eat it, then?” I ask tiredly.
“ ’Cause everything else is, like, poisonous,” she says. “Everything else will give you cancer. The planet is so totally wrecked.” She swallows a mouthful of yogurt, shudders.
“Lavender?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you tell Travis that if he eats snow he could die?”
“It’s true!”
“And that in a few years we’ll all have to wear gas masks?”
She shrugs.
“You know,” I say. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t think things are working out too well with you living here.”
She looks up, sighs deeply. “You’re, like, kicking me out, right?”
“Not ‘like.’ ”
“I knew it.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“So . . . end of the month, right?”
“Right.”
Lavender nods. “This always happens.”
“Frankly, I’m not surprised.” I want to ask Lavender who her references were. Probably relatives who wanted to make sure she didn’t end up with them. But what’s the difference?
I go upstairs to Travis’s bedroom, sit at his desk, look around his room. He has made his bed, more or less. I reach over to tuck in one edge of the sheet, pull on the quilt to straighten it, find a sock, hold it in my hand. I look out his window, remember when his chin barely came to the ledge, remember him later sitting on my lap while I helped him undress for bed, looking out that same window at the setting sun and saying, with wonder, “The sky’s coming down.” When I came downstairs, smiling, I told David what Travis had said. From behind his newspaper, David said, “Huh. He’s mixed up.”