“Yes,” said Sarah.
“And you’re sure you want that woman’s child?”
Edward began to cough. “Excuse me — is there a bathroom I might use?”
“Why do you say that about the birth mom?” asked Sarah.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. McKowen. “I guess, well, the lady’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.
“Washroom’s around the corner,” she said to Edward.
Edward got up, turned the corner, and abandoned us.
“She wants to go back to school,” said Sarah.
“Sikhool,” repeated Mary.
“Yes, school,” cooed Sarah.
“Yes, school,” said Mrs. McKowen, sighing. “She’s always talking about that.”
“You see her often?”
“Well, it’s a requirement of Catholic Social Services that she come here to visit the child once a month. Creates an opportunity for bonding, which they don’t want to be accused of having deprived her of. Also an opportunity for change of heart. Which I don’t see coming about in any complete way.” She paused. “You believe her story about the rape?”
“What rape?”
“Lynette?” called Mrs. McKowen, and her loud voice caused the toddler to burst into tears. “Could you come feed Mary? It’s getting to be on towards lunch.”
The teenage girl stepped out from the shadows and toward the baby, who burst into a watery smile at the sight of her.
“Lynette, this is Sarah and … her people,” she said with a vague wave toward me and toward Edward, who had just returned from his quick pee.
“Hi,” said Lynette, and she picked the baby up and away from Sarah, settling her easily on her blue-jeaned hip, then took her out of the room. That was that.
“She didn’t tell you she was raped?” said Mrs. McKowen. Now that the baby was gone there was a certain force in the question.
“No,” said Sarah.
“Hmm,” said Mrs. McKowen.
“Maybe she wasn’t.”
“Maybe not.”
“Maybe she just wanted an excuse for what she was doing.”
“Maybe. Don’t see how that works, though,” said Mrs. McKowen, who then said no more, and soon she stood, walked to the door, and opened it.
We left, looking for lunch.
“Let’s see, where shall we go? It’s early, so we should miss the crowds.” Sarah turned on the car radio. The radio was on some sort of soul station and was playing a rap song with extreme female moaning in the background. “You gotta do it, roll it, run it, up it, down it. Gotta do it, roll it, run it, rock it …”—a conjugation of every sort. Edward flicked the radio off disdainfully. But Sarah turned it back on. “Sex is the only good thing the world has given them. At least listen to it.”
I could see she was getting ready to enter a new understanding of society. It would be artificial and touristic. It would be motherhood in a safari suit. But how not? It was better than some. Probably it was better than most.
We found a metal-edged diner, went in, and sat at the counter side by side, letting our coats fall off our shoulders and dangle from the stools, anchored by our sitting butts. The counter had been freshly wiped with some piney disinfectant and right where we sat there was an old red Coca-Cola dispenser that resembled the outboard motor of a boat. I sat between Sarah and Edward, like a child. This they seemed to like, but it made it hard for me to have any appetite at all. I could not eat, as if eating were the most inappropriate and irrelevant and perhaps even revolting thing we could be doing right then. At one point I turned too quickly and the wrist edge of my sweater sleeve knocked some french fries to the floor. When I was younger I could get away with not eating something I didn’t like by claiming to my parents either that it was too rich or that it had fallen on the floor. (Later I would use this with people: “She was too rich” or “He fell on the floor — what is there to say?”) And here I was now suddenly verklempt by my indifference to food. I was floating away from myself. My breath would go musty and sour if I did not eat, so I tried. I ordered a vanilla milk shake and sucked it down. Edward and Sarah would occasionally reach across me to touch each other — a hand on a thigh, or upper arm, or shoulder — and then retreat into their separate and separating spaces. Everyone was quiet, though I wasn’t sure why.
We returned to the hotel, headed to our respective rooms. I noticed that when older people got tired they looked a lot older, whereas when young people got tired they just looked tired. Sarah and Edward looked a little aged; our early lunch had not refreshed them and some worry had knotted their mouths and generally dragged their features downward. They were waiting for a phone call, they said, and they would call me after they got it.
“OK,” I said, and crawled back into my room and into my bed with my clothes on. I’d brought only one book, the Zen poems, and was finding their obliqueness fatiguing and ripe for parody. I decided instead to investigate the official Judeo-Christian comedy, and pulled the Gideon Bible from the nightstand drawer. I started at the beginning, day one, when God created the heavens and the earth and gave them form. There’d been no form before. Just amorphous blobbery. God then said let there be light, in order to get a little dynamic going between night and day, though the moon and stars and sun were not the generators of this light but merely a kind of middle management, supervisors, glorified custodians, since they were not created until later — day four — as can happen with bureaucracy, even of the cosmic sort. Still, I thought of all the songs that had been written about these belated moon and stars and sun, compared to songs about form. Not one good song about form! Sometimes a week just got more inspiring as it went along. Still, it was truly strange that there was morning and night on day one though the sun wasn’t created until day four. Perhaps God didn’t have a proofreader until, like, day forty-seven, but by that time all sorts of weird things were happening. Perhaps he was really, completely on his own until then, making stuff up and then immediately forgetting what he’d made up already. People were dying and coming back and having babies and then not able to, so their handmaidens would instead. Then I slid into the nap I knew the lunchtime milk shake would bring on if I just let it.
I awoke to a faint knocking on the door.
“Tassie? It’s Sarah. We’re going to go to the hospital for the baby’s checkup. Do you want to come?”
“Yes, I’m coming,” I said, then hurried to the door to open it, but it slammed into the brass slide lock through which I peered, dazed, as if through bars, at a slim slice of Sarah.
My nap had not effectively rebooted me. Sarah was wearing her winter coat, but I could still see she was shrugging beneath it. “The agency is switching foster families and they have an appointment this afternoon at the hospital for our little girl.” She was also wearing that hand-knitted hat with the ear flaps and pom-pom ties. Were these back in style? Had they ever been in style?
I had to close the door on her completely in order to undo the lock and open it again, this time wide. “Let me get my shoes on,” I said.
“This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite,” she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.
“Well, even presidents get shot,” I said.
“I was just going to say that myself,” she said, smiling. “But I didn’t want to scare you.”
I didn’t know whether this was interesting — that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing — or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin’s Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep, private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet. An exfoliating narrative, my professors would probably say. The paratext of the possible.