If they were lucky enough to make it to Pastor Tom’s after that, the boy would have to duck to enter the tiny ranch house. Pauline would no doubt bring out the Hawaiian bathing trunks from Walmart and tell the boy he needed to put them on and get in the churning hot tub on the crumbling deck and give his life over to Christ. Paul imagined there might be some resistance to that. They would leave with the boy furious and unbaptized, and Pauline, unwilling to admit defeat, would babble on and on in the car about the things she babbled on and on about: that God would always be ready for Gordon whenever Gordon decided he was ready, what Gordon might want on his tacos, a roadside deer here, a roadside deer there, an early blooming forsythia, an icicle that resembled Priscilla Presley, a sign for the World’s Largest Teapot, her family members and what ailed them—Grandpa Turner: emphysema; Cousin Kevin: diabetes; Aunt Polly: shingles.
The boy would demand that Pauline pull the car over. He would throw open the door, leap out and scream from the gravel shoulder: Fuck you! Fuck both of you! I hate you! I hate you! This has been the worst day of my life! Why would I ever want to live with people like you? And Paul would waddle his body out of the car’s backseat and gently confront the boy while Pauline fought back tears. Paul would calmly explain that Pauline meant well but was sometimes overbearing. And that he, Paul, understood disappointment. He’d tell the boy that he knew how awful life could be. He’d say all the boy needed to do was to head back to their place for a few minutes and take a glimpse at the room Pauline had fixed up for him and scarf down a few tacos and then he was a free man. No strings attached. A day he could write off as a weird experiment. Paul would talk the boy down, and they’d drive back to the house and Pauline would talk much less on the way home, scared of what her big mouth had gone and done, and they’d have a couple of laughs and Gordon would be polite enough to take a look at the room, and, while Pauline grated the taco cheese and The Lion King waited on pause, Paul would take the opportunity to talk to Gordon alone. To ask him what he liked and what he wanted to be when he grew up, which was just a year away. And Paul saw himself looking up at the boy and listening, but not really. He saw himself overjoyed, overcome, over the moon, not hearing a word. As Gordon talked, the world would go silent for Paul. Silent in a way that he could finally handle. And there in the backseat of the car, as the Corvette wound through the cold mountains, Paul began to love the boy before he’d even seen him.
BIG BAD
THE FIRST TIME Helen gave birth to herself, she was fifteen and a half. She drove herself to the hospital in her brother’s Trans Am (she’d just gotten her learner’s permit the Wednesday before), and by the time she squealed into the parking lot, panting and panicked, her red hooded sweatshirt drenched, a foot had emerged between her legs. To her amazement, the foot was her own, just an older version of the one crammed against the Trans Am’s brake pedal, but this foot, the one kicking out one side of her soccer shorts, had a tendon-y elegance to it, not to mention chic red toenails instead of cheap, iridescent pink ones. Helen stared for a good half minute at the twitching extremity, at its slippery sheen and eager arching, until a contraction hit. Then she fell forward on the steering wheel and blared the car horn with her forehead. Soon enough, a nurse appeared with a wheelchair and brought her inside to an unamused doctor.
“Well, whadda you know,” he said. “Looks like someone got herself pregnant.”
At this, the nurse rolled her eyes. Helen frowned and unfrowned. She had a flash of time between contractions to consider the possibility that the doctor was right. That it was she, her own bad self, and not Dustin Mulhouse, who had knocked her up. She ran the day (“Boom-Boom Wednesday” was what they’d named it) through her mind. The sunlight had come down through the birch trees in Collier’s Glen as if God was granting his blessing. There’d been a bottle of Rumple Minze. A little portable CD player playing Van Morrison. A plaid blanket that smelled of Drakkar Noir. The way Dustin had said please-please-please and she’d said yes-yes-yes was like something lifted from a romance novel. Nope, Helen thought. That was no solo performance.
“No one gets themselves pregnant,” the nurse huffed, releasing the wheelchair brake with an angry kick. “Women aren’t parthenogenetic.”
Helen gave a little giggle. The nurse patted her back in a brief moment of sisterhood, and that was that. Helen remembered nothing from there on out. She did not remember the doctor lecturing her at ten centimeters about the reservoir tip of condoms and boys’ one-track minds and how tarnished reputations never regain their sterling status. She did not remember screaming, the blood vessels bursting in her eyes, the twenty-nine-year-old version of herself being pulled out (beautiful, ballerina feet first) by four nurses and two doctors. She did not recall dying in labor, rising above the scene, seeing her parents and brother and Dustin weep and gnash and teddy-bear-and-tulip the room. She just went away, up to a little cumulonimbus, and let what was left of herself carry on.
Her new self wasn’t all bad. But she certainly wasn’t good. She was too thin and too willing and too quiet. She had already abandoned the notion of her own satisfaction (and her degree in biology) in exchange for perfection. Helen 29 was all about a man, Bill 54, who needed her to perform certain things to make him feel important and safe, most notably, smiling in approval and nodding in accord and tucking her bony hand into the crook of his camel-haired elbow at parties that celebrated nothing. Sometimes he needed her to arch her back this way, or kneel and pout that way, or to look at him from across a dimmed bedroom in a manner that erased who she really was for who he wanted her to be. These things made Bill feel palpably good, and Helen supposed it was only proper to share in his joy by acknowledging she had provided it. It’s like a meal, she told herself. You have cooked it and served it and now you must enjoy watching him devour it. So she did. Helen 29 gave Bill the things he wanted: warm laughter and Christmas cards, an opinionated son, a compliant daughter, while he gave her bracelets and warnings.
As time went on, Bill wanted a third child: a roguish second son who would handle the sales and marketing of his life. He could see the son now. He could taste what the boy would do for him. He will be my crown jewel, Bill said. The last act. But Helen had begun to feel the wind through her body; she knew it was only a matter of time before she completely vanished. So, when Bill pressed her against the bedroom wall and entered her, when he held her hands above her head and handcuffed her wrists with his fat fingers, she let the seed take root, knowing full well there would be no second son, but instead a third version of herself. One so ugly that she’d be abandoned for a new 29, maybe a 24.
And that was how it went. Nine months later, when Helen’s water broke in the kitchen, she sent the children promptly to the neighbor’s, went upstairs and put on her pearl choker and pearl earrings and French perfume, then called for Bill to meet her at the hospital. Within an hour, Helen 29 was dead. The long-anticipated, russet-headed son with a knack for sealing the deal had not emerged as a consolation prize. Nor had a second, agreeable daughter. Instead, a third version of Helen, a forty-something, jowly wench with rolled-up sleeves and a curled-up lip arose from the puddle on the delivery room floor, marched over to Bill, and slapped two caps off his ivory smile.