Stanley wanted kids. She wanted kids. They were as compatib le on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Alien's films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both
great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it — it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. Someday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize th e thought; like the word pornographic, it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! Weare your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.
In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. 'We want to know if there is something wrong,' Stanley said, 'and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.'
They took the tests. They showed that Stanley's sperm was perky, that Patty's eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.
Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways simila r to sexual impotency — the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.
Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.
'I never do,' he said.
'Do what?'
'Think of procreation during. '
She began to giggle, even though she was by then feeling a bit lonesome and frightened. And that night, lying in bed, long after she believed that Stanley must be asleep, he had frightened her by speaking out of the dark. His voice was flat but nevertheless choked with tears. 'It's me,' he said. 'It's my fault.'
She rolled toward him, groped for him, held him.
'Don't be a stupid,' she said. But her heart was beating fast — much too fast. It wasn't just that he had startled her; it was as if he had looked into her mind and read a secret conviction she held there but of which she had not known until this minute. With no rhyme, no reason, she felt — knew — that he was right. There was something wrong, and it wasn't her. It was him. Something in him.
'Don't be such a klutz,' she whispered fiercely against his shoulder. He was sweating lightly and she became suddenly aware that he was afraid. The fear was coming off him in cold waves; lying naked with him was suddenly like lying naked in front of an open refrigerator.
'I'm not a klutz and I'm not being stupid,' he said in that same voice, which was simultaneously flat and choked with emotion, 'and you know it. It's me. But I don't know why. '
'You can't know any such thing.' Her voice was harsh, scolding — her mother's voice when her mother was afraid. And even as she scolded him a shudder ran through her body, twisting it like a whip. Stanley felt it and his arms tightened around her.
'Sometimes,' he said, 'sometimes I think I know why. Sometimes I have a dream, a bad dream, and I wake up and I think, "I know now. I know what's wrong." Not just you not catching pregnant — everything. Everything that's wrong with my life.'
'Stanley, nothing's wrong with your life!'
'I don't mean from inside,' he said. 'From inside is fine. I'm talking about outside. Something that should be over and isn't. I wake up from these dreams and think, "My whole pleasant life has been nothing but the eye of some storm I don't understand." I'm afraid. But then it just . . . fades. The way dreams do.'
She knew that he sometimes dreamed uneasily. On half a dozen occasions he had awakened her, thrashing and moaning. Probably there had been other times when she had slept through his dark interludes. Whenever she reached for him, asked him, he said the same thing: I can't remember. Then he would reach for his cigarettes and smoke sitting up in bed, waiting for the residue of the dream to pass through his pores like bad sweat.
No kids. On the night of May 28th, 1985 — the night of the bath — their assorted in-laws were still waiting to be grandparents. The extra room was still an extra room; the Stayfree Maxis and Stayfree Minis still occupied their accustomed places in the cupboard under the bathroom sink; the cardinal still paid its monthly visit. Her mother, who was much occupied with her own affairs but not entirely oblivious to her daughter's pain, had stopped asking in her letters and when Stanley and Patty made their twice-yearly trips back to New York. There were no more humorous remarks about whether or not they were taking their vitamin E. Stanley had also stopped mentioning babies, but sometimes, when he didn't know she was looking, she saw a shadow on his face. Some shadow. As if he were trying desperately to remember something.
Other than that one cloud, their lives were pleasant enough until the phone rang during the middle of Family Feud on the night of May 28th. Patty had six of Stan's shirts, two of her blouses, her sewing kit, and her odd-button box; Stan had the new William Denbrough novel, not even out in paperback yet, in his hands. There was a snarling beast on the front of this book. On the back was a bald man wearing glasses.
Stan was sitting nearer the phone. He picked it up and said, 'Hello — Uris residence.'
He listened, and a frown line delved between his eyebrows. 'Who did you say?'
Patty felt an instant of fright. Later, shame would cause her to lie and tell her parents that she had known something was wrong from the instant the telephone had rung, but in reality there had only been that one instant, that one quick look up from her sewing. But maybe that was all right. Maybe they had both suspected that something was coming long before that phone call, something that didn't fit with the nice house set tastefully back behind the low yew hedges, something so much a given that it really didn't need much of an acknowledgment . . . that one sharp instant of fright, like the stab of a quickly withdrawn icepick, was enough.
Is it Mom? she mouthed at him in that instant, thinking that perhaps her father, twenty pounds overweight and prone to what he called 'the bellyache' since his early forties, had had a heart attack.