“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Harriet said, over and over again, trying to engage the secret harmony of it, trying to make her own words matter.
“Tell you what, Harriet? What do you need to know, honey? Tell me what it is you want me to say.”
Boyd was always mending, reupholstering, abrading, polishing, trying to hide things from her. Nicks and imperfections, textures, conspiracies of pipe and cable. He painted things, and applied wallpaper, and hung new doors, working late into the night while Harriet slept. Sawing, hammering, painting. New bolts on the windows, new drapes in the living room. The scraping of metal against metal. The screak of vises. The shuddering of lathes.
“After we have the baby, Boyd, then what? What happens to us then?”
She lay beside him in bed. Boyd was sketching things on a clipboard.
“Hmm,” Boyd said. He was consulting the latest issue of Home Design Management that lay open in his lap.
“You’re not listening to me, Boyd.”
“Of course I’m listening.” He held a glimmering metric ruler up to the light. “Once we have the baby, we’ll be happy. Then everything will be okay.”
One night in early March Harriet awoke and discovered herself suddenly enormous. The sheets and blankets were soaking wet, wrapped around her sore, swollen thighs like the leaves of a cabbage. She felt surfeited and overindulged, washed up drunk on a beach somewhere, entangled with rubbery brown polyps and plankton. She reached for the bedside lamp and knocked aluminum cake tins onto the floor, ice-cream containers, extinguished cookie packets. She tried to sit up and failed. Then, again, on the count of three. She peeled the damp sheets from her legs. Suddenly, she was sitting up. She was sitting on the edge of the bed.
Silver shapes glided around the bedroom, as if the moon were riding a carousel. She looked through the gauzy drapes at the freeway, headlights skirling past, an entire universe filled with history and blind intention. She knew it before she heard it, like the shape of an extracted tooth, intimate and strange.
Somewhere deep inside the house the voice said:
This is it. Here we go. It’s time.
“I know,” Harriet said. “You don’t have to tell me. I already know.”
Boyd was getting out of bed. He was already wearing his Levi’s and pulling on a blue T-shirt.
“Just relax and stay calm,” Boyd said, guiding her down the front stairs, dispensing an aroma of Old Spice and Vaseline. Their car was idling in the driveway, a ’55 Chevy Custom Chief with whitewall tires and padded dash. It was filled with animal patience, like something slumbering in a cave.
Then Harriet was in the car. Boyd adjusted her seat and pulled a small perforated wool blanket across her knees. She watched her fat, freckled hands in her lap.
The voice said, We’ll be there in a few minutes, so try to relax. This is what you’ve been waiting for. Pretty soon, you’ll have everything you’ve ever wanted. And then it’ll all be yours.
“Is it really?” Harriet asked. Boyd was slamming the trunk and wiping the rear windshield with a soggy paper towel. “Is this what I’ve been waiting for? I knew I was waiting for something, but I guess I never knew what it was.”
Boyd climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed shut his door. The automobile was intact now, enclosing a perfect bubble of space and heat. The automobile started to move.
“I’ve been through this before,” Boyd assured her. Mist thickened on the windshield and Boyd activated the wipers. “A piece of cake, really. It’s all in the breathing. My first wife Betty, she panicked, couldn’t breathe. Then they injected her with a sedative and bang. As soon as she stopped thinking, she breathed perfectly.”
They were passing through streets lined with overturned garbage cans. City lights were everywhere. They just didn’t seem to reveal anything.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Harriet asked. “Why did I have to wait so long?”
“I’m sorry, babe.” Boyd was gazing abstractly out the window, computing logistical distances, road conditions, those soft rear tires that needed replacing. “Why didn’t I tell you what?”
“Can I ask questions?” Harriet asked the smooth white lights wheeling through the car. “Or am I just supposed to listen?”
The hospital was surrounded by brightly illuminated gray parking lots, like some neglected outdoor cinema. The doors to the emergency room opened automatically, and Boyd helped Harriet into a wheelchair. “I called ahead,” Boyd told her, “and alerted Dr. Wilde. Don’t be frightened. If you need anything, all you have to do is ask.”
There was something in the silence behind Boyd’s voice Harriet wanted to hear.
And then, with a long sustained gasp, Harriet felt her body start to breathe.
“Je-sus,” Harriet said. “Je-sus.”
Everything speeded up. Harriet was being conveyed down long corridors, and then transferred to a tissue-lined examination table. She reached out. She was holding someone. She pulled the hands closer, closer.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me, tell me.”
“It’s okay, baby. They’ve gone for the doctor. Looks like you’re not going to make anybody wait around, are you? I’ve told them to give you something for the pain—”
The entire room clenched around her, and she felt the deepness of her body exerting pressure back. “No,” Harriet told him, “no, don’t, no, no,” without even listening, without trying to decipher what Boyd’s words meant.
Then she felt two enormous hands come down, grip her by the waist and lift her up off the table.
“Je-sus,” she said. “Je-sus.”
Her body seemed very far away. She was connected to her own sensations by a long, microscopic filament of light.
”Tell me,” she said. “Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.”
“Tell you what, honey? You keep asking that. Tell you what? I’m listening, honey.”
“Don’t,” Harriet told his hands. She was trying to reach into the light’s white canvas, the pure white soundless texture that once filled her mother’s apartment with everything Harriet couldn’t be. She thought she saw Boyd, but it wasn’t, wasn’t him, because Boyd didn’t matter, Boyd had never really been. Then she saw him, the man with the voice looking down at her, understanding how she felt and what she needed, loving her for all the right reasons. She could see him but she couldn’t see him. He was there and he wasn’t there.
It doesn’t make things any easier, the voice told her. Even when you know, it doesn’t make you happy.
“I understand,” Harriet said, “it doesn’t matter, I don’t need to be happy, tell me, tell me, I really will understand.” Harriet was crying. Exultation filled her with heat and oxygen and light. “This,” Harriet cried, “is just perfect,” and then the hands came swinging down again and struck iron through her stomach, her pelvis, and spine and lifted, lifted her off the table, up through the wide bright air and soft, impactless white glare of the ceiling. Nobody ever told her but now she knew, she knew. She was hurtling through the white air, the bellows of her lungs beating and swallowing at the rough pale atmosphere like an engine, and nobody had to tell her anything ever again because finally she knew, she knew, she knew, she knew.
I don’t appreciate the smugness of generic fiction. By “generic” (and I’m being deliberately nonacademic here), I mean just about anything you can classify. As soon as you find yourself wondering “Is this SF, or Fantasy, or Serious Literature?” you’ve stopped enjoying it, and listening to what it has to tell you. At this point, you might as well not bother.