She woke again, rose from the couch, saw the stained cartons of kung pao chicken, sesame chicken, sweet and sour chicken, and mystery moo shoo. She retched. She took a shower and made gunpowder tea and sat on the toilet and sighed. She had a date tonight.
It would be odd to see Sean again. Her best friend in college, Callie, had a brother, and everyone had agreed that this lean black-haired wonder was bound for an extraordinary life. Sean might direct a morally resonant movie, or design a marvelous bridge, or climb a heretofore unscalable mountain both to prove his prowess and deliver medicine to a snowed-in camp on the far slope. He had a keen mind, a daredevil physicality, a conscience. You could picture him leading large, semi-whimsical social movements.
At his sister’s party during one Christmas break years before, Sean’s graciousness, even more than his charisma, had undone Tovah. Sean made the rounds, checked on everybody’s drinks, lavished his attentions on the shy. When he walked up and handed Tovah a daiquiri and they spoke for a few moments about turtles, or tortoises of great size and longevity, Tovah felt something magical and formfitting slip over her: a tunic of light. This was the way Jesus must have worked, some petty wonder talk while revelation sunk its celestial needle. An artificial insemination of the soul. Soon Sean drifted away, perhaps to knock up other guests.
Tovah never saw him again and thought about him constantly. She waited for word of his victories. Callie nourished her with stories about new jobs and cities, so that Sean became a character in some corny but secretly enthralling serial adventure. He worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, wrote experimental screenplays in Gobi desert yurts, enrolled in architecture school, film school, medical school (but only for research, with no intention of doctoring). He had undertaken a scientifically significant balloon journey. But after a while the stories got hazy. Callie said something about a junk habit.
Tovah wondered if Sean was the type who peaked just before setting off into the world, the boy the gang bets on before they understand life. A sad notion, but she still wanted to see him. He’d reached out to her through several friends (not Callie, though, who’d broken with Tovah over a misunderstanding about the location of a brunch spot). Sean’s contact was not random, but certainly sudden.
His interest surprised her. People had eased away from Tovah. She had become a tad too prickly, or self-sufficient. Maybe her empathy seemed strained. Unfair, this last, as she really felt for others, and with them, but it never quite came across. That’s what creative writing was for. She knew better, from so many workshops, than to suggest that poetry existed to express one’s feelings, though infuriatingly, hers did.
A baby, however, especially a baby bred to be lean and coal haired and jade eyed and slant smiled, like Sean, could learn to express Tovah’s feelings, too, without the torture of words.
* * *
Out on Broadway, Tovah stepped into a hat boutique, the kind of sparse, dusty affair you assume would be a depression’s first prey, but here it stood. Tovah hated hats, or could never conceive of a hat that would suit her, except maybe a floppy straw thing she could wear to the beach with sunglasses and coquettishly unflattering sandals. She’d lug along books in a canvas bag, but when would she get to the beach? She lived on an island, sure, but that didn’t mean she numbered among those permitted to go to the beach.
“Can I help you?” said the salesgirl.
She seemed, but didn’t look, fifteen.
“Who comes in here?” Tovah asked.
“People looking for hats.”
“That is twisted.”
Tovah felt funny. Maybe she hadn’t really bounced back from last night’s death feast.
Maybe what she’d been on the couch was pregnant, though only ignorance could make it true. You could reckon the dates, track the cycles, but then certain facts press down. You couldn’t be pregnant if you hadn’t been laid in three years. A devout Catholic could still hope, but not Tovah. She’d never even considered herself the maternal type. She didn’t believe there was such a temperament, unless one assembled it in the culture factory along with images of women as radiant white creatures traipsing through summer fields with their tanned, though still white, spawn.
Those were the old lies. The newer ones claimed that all committed mothers could also manage begemmed careers, that only the weak or untalented had to choose. But even the mothers at Sweet Apple, not to mention her former school, could not disguise their struggle. Instead they sought catharsis in their comic monologues about the slog, or the sick joke of being marked as both mediocre mothers and lousy colleagues.
Some mothers at Sweet Apple had gleaned an even greater shift: the shame in procreation. People glared at families, at mothers. Nobody got up for pregnant women on the subway anymore. The planet couldn’t sustain more mouths. So stand, greedy lady.
Tovah had picked her side years before. No peace-shredding hominid would find shelter in her womb. She loved to play with the pre-K kids, but live with one? Then something embarrassing and maybe purely chemical occurred. She wanted a baby. That was all. She still believed everything she believed, cultivated privacy and solitude, and, despite her attachment to the Sweet Apple tykes, believed childlessness the noble course (yes, your kid might cure cancer, but probably he’d grow up to play video games or, if the world followed its current path, huddle in a gulch slurping gulchwater and recalling the magnificence of video games). But she wanted a baby. That’s what her body was for, in the cruel scheme of things, and she craved the bleakness of biology. It didn’t matter if the baby was hers, except it absolutely did. She wanted to carry it and give birth to it and breast-feed it and live in a natural cocoon with it for as long as possible, with somebody on the outside slipping everything she needed through a slim vent. In this way life would be joyful instead of nearly unlivable. The part of her that she’d always trusted knew this was crazy, but that part had also, one had to admit, led her to this grim limbo.
Tovah started across the street for a cleansing smoothie. Somebody shouted her name. Mr. Gautier strode toward her. He had a sharp-boned swagger and wore a hat, a baseball cap, stitched with the words GLYPH SYSTEMS.
“Mr. Gautier,” she called.
“Randy.”
“Hello,” Tovah said.
Mr. Gautier put a hand on Tovah’s shoulder, took a few hard breaths. He dipped his head and spat something pebble sized onto the pavement. Tovah noticed the tiny hearing aid that lurked behind a shrub of ear hair.
“You played hooky today,” he said.
“It was a day off. I’m only part-time.”
“Did you hear what happened over there?”
She could picture only worst-case scenarios. Fires, floods, a collapsed ceiling in the lunch nook, a child pincered in that window sash the caretaker still hadn’t fixed. Or maybe Laura had finally snapped, kicked one of what she liked to call the Future Date Rapists of America in the skull. Boys, Laura had told her, were bad for schools, bad for society.
Which wasn’t to say, Laura added, that she didn’t love the cuties to death.
“Dezzy was in the climber room,” Mr. Gautier said, “and she fell off the … whatever it is.”
“The climber.”
“The climber,” Mr. Gautier said. “They could just say jungle gym. What’s the big diff?”
“Is Dezzy okay?” Tovah asked. “Those pads on the floor are pretty soft.”
“She’s fine. That’s not the point. She freaked out, and she cried for you. I’m convinced she feels more comfortable and confident with you around.”
“That’s sweet. She’s so delicious. Really.”
Tovah had heard other teachers use “delicious” this way. It seemed natural, but also strange, which maybe described cannibalism in general.