He took her to meet his family—Wanda, Phil, Jane, and Eddy. Wanda and Phil were his parents, Jane and Eddy his father’s children by a previous marriage. “You seem like a terrific young girl,” Phil said, “and Boyd has told us so many wonderful things about you. He never gave us any idea, though, exactly how pretty you were.” They sat on the splintery veranda, drinking sun tea spiced with licorice, watching the sunset expand over Hermosa Beach. Phil turned to Wanda. “But she really is pretty, don’t you think? Especially her hair.”
Boyd’s family usually talked about Harriet in the third person.
“Not only that,” Wanda said, “But just look at her teeth. I wish I had teeth like that. Then I could eat anything I wanted.”
“And such a nice figure,” Phil said, looking her up and down. Phil was a jeweler in Santa Monica. “Boyd must be the envy of all his friends at the office.” Phil winked at Harriet and blushed, holding his bony knees together.
“We sure like her better than Marjorie,” Jane and Eddy called out from the living room, where they basked in the pale, unearthly light of the RCA. “No matter how nice she pretended to be, Marjorie was always a big fat drag.”
Wanda distributed more tea and packaged cookies. She leaned toward Harriet and stage-whispered: “Boyd’s last wife was a very nice woman, and provided Boyd’s children with a wonderful role model and all that. But she was never a very sexual sort of person. And Boyd, as you must know by now, likes to exchange a lot of good healthy pleasure with his women. Much like his father.” Wanda showed Harriet lumpy sugar in a white ceramic bowl. “I forget already—do you take sugar?”
“No,” Harriet said. “I never take sugar in my tea.”
“She’s watching her figure,” Phil said. His flushed, vein-burst face winked inconstantly at Harriet, like a broken signal at a railway crossing. “She doesn’t want to lose her gorgeous figure—and neither do we, hey, son? Neither do we.”
Boyd married her and bought a house. That was the end, really. There was nowhere left for her to go.
“It’s got a basement and an attic,” Boyd said proudly. “Two bedrooms and a den. The kitchen needs work, but there’s no problem with the heating. And the yard is enormous. Like ten normal-sized yards, really. A big, I mean a really big yard. We could have twelve kids running around in that yard and they wouldn’t see each other for weeks.”
The house was wide, complicated and dense, poured into the earth with concrete, hammered together with wood and nails. Harriet couldn’t cry and couldn’t sleep, lying in bed all day until Boyd returned home from his new subcontractor’s job at the mall. She heard the power lines in the street, pigeons on the rooftop, the aluminum rustle of gas in the stove. Every morning cartons of fresh milk and butter appeared on the doorstep. Newspapers, shopping coupons, stray cats howling at the wind.
She bound her feet with twine in order to cut off the circulation. She plucked hairs from her face and secretly bit her tongue. She ate too many grapefruit, and rinsed the cold sores in her mouth with vinegar, salt, and lime concentrate. She explored those regions of her body where sewing needles didn’t leave marks. It might be Boyd’s house, but it was still her body. I, Harriet told herself, am completely my decision.
Boyd began exhibiting a strange and unhealthy concern for Harriet’s menses, circling dates on the Val’s Used Autos calendar with a black felt laundry marker. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,” Boyd told himself out loud, and circled the final date with a proud little flourish, as if he were endorsing a particularly generous check. Then he took the thermometer from the kitchen cabinet, swabbed it with alcohol, and called out Harriet’s name.
There was something implacable about the way Boyd made love to her now, as if he were straining against the skin of a bubble, trying to tell her something language could not convey. “I’ve reinsulated the attic,” Boyd told her in bed, rocking gently against her, as cautious as if he were caressing helium. “I’ve discussed the basement plumbing with a regional contractor. This spring, I’ll paint the place. I’ll put down new carpets and a new yard. Depreciation, baby. That’s what finally buries you. By the way, did I tell you I love you, Harriet? Did I tell you you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life?”
There were books on the bureau beside the thermometer. The Home Pregnancy Handbook, Fertility and Nutrition, Conception and the Stars. Harriet, however, was wary of books. She was afraid they might not keep their words to themselves.
“I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl,” Boyd said later. “I just hope it’s a Gemini.”
By now, Harriet felt so estranged from her own body she couldn’t believe any of it was happening to her. Nurses, obstetricians, waxed fluorescent corridors, hurrying orderlies, and drugged, dozing patients on gurneys. From the moment the doctor told her, Harriet pretended to play along.
“Get plenty of rest,” the doctor told her. “And exercise. A nice long walk every morning should do it. Don’t drink to excess, but a little wine in the evening won’t hurt anything.”
“Okay,” Harriet said. She was looking at a dietary chart the doctor had presented her. The chart was printed on an embossed sheet of plastic and depicted colorful pie graphs, statistical charts, and a brief illustrated history of gestation. “I can do that.”
“She looks like a madonna,” Boyd’s mother said. “She looks like the most beautiful mother-to-be in the entire world.” Wanda and Phil arrived every Saturday afternoon bearing homemade soups, casseroles, Tupperware-clad fruit salads, and bright packaged gifts Harriet was expected to open. Blankets, diaper bags, Nerf toys, music boxes, Pooh books, illustrated nursery rhymes. Harriet would smile and try to look nonplussed.
“She seems so peaceful. So content with herself.”
“Her body’s generating this drug that helps her relax—I read about it once in a magazine.”
“She used to be so edgy and insecure. Boyd’s been really good for her. He knew all along she just needed someone to care for. It’s a woman’s biological role. Even when women aren’t having babies, they dream about having them all the time.”
“That’s the full flush of motherhood, all right,” Phil said wisely, and showed Boyd the roll of floral-patterned linoleum he had purchased for the family room. “And we know it’ll be a beautiful baby, because all Boyd’s women have beautiful babies.”
Now at night it was Harriet who wanted to make love, and Harriet who wanted Boyd to hold her. Boyd was always reading now—You and Your Baby, Dr. Spock’s Guide to Infant Growth and Development, Owning Your Second Home, Building Your Own Bomb Shelter. He ate Butterfinger candy bars, drank warm beer from aluminum cans, and watched war movies on late-night TV.
“Tell me,” Harriet insisted, “tell me, tell me.” Straining against Boyd’s density, his steel and concrete and brick.
“We have to be careful,” Boyd whispered, overturning his paperback on the end table, lowering himself under the blankets as if he were immersing himself in a cold tub. “Your condition. This trimester. For all concerned. You know I love you.”
“Tell me,” Harriet said, pushing, reaching, clenching his callused hands against her breasts, demanding his skin, his impact, his intestinal flux and hiss.
“You’re going to hurt yourself, honey. Now please, let me, let me…”