I make my way around the periphery of the house, cutting across the patio and onto the lawn. There I pause midstride, hands on hips, and look skyward to see that the stars are lost somewhere behind the clouds. That there isn’t a star in sight. The moon is there, but only a sliver of it. A crescent moon that doesn’t do anything to light up the night. The fall air is cool; goose bumps appear on my arms. I rub at them, hoping the friction will make them go away. For now it does, though I’m dreading another night in the freezing cold carriage home.
The home is enveloped in blackness as I arrive. I have to fight to get the key into its hole. Twice I drop it, scrabbling around on the stoop to hunt it down.
The sound of a siren in the distance startles me. As I glance backward, over my shoulder to see the red and blue emergency lights whirling through the sky, I find Ms. Geissler standing in the back doorway of her home. She’s illuminated by kitchen lights, easier to see than me, who stands in total darkness.
And yet her eyes are unmistakably on mine as if she’s been watching me the entire time.
I find the keyhole and open the door. I hurry inside.
As I climb the lopsided steps, I feel the weight of fatigue bearing down on me. Fatigue from physical exertion and fatigue from lack of sleep. I lie down on the mattress, staring at my shaky hands before my eyes. There’s an anemic quality to them. Blanched and mealy, the skin at their edges disappearing somehow, evanescing, like a loose thread being tugged from the hem of a shirt, the whole thing unraveling, coming apart at the seams. That’s me. Coming apart at the seams. Little by little, I’m disappearing.
I look again at my hands, and this time they are fine. Intact.
But still shaking.
I close my eyes and even though sleep is there within reach and I stretch my hand out to grab it, it’s unattainable. Elusive and shifty. It moves away, mocking me. Laughing in my face.
For as tired as I am, I still cannot sleep.
eden
December 21, 1996 Egg Harbor
For months now, Aaron and I have become slaves to the red circles on my pocket-size calendar, our intimacies slated out in advance. During my most fertile days we make love two, sometimes three times a day, though there’s something inorganic about it now, something mechanical and forced. Our entire world, it seems, has become about making a baby, and I struggle to remember what our lives were like before we made the decision to start a family.
Two nights ago I stayed up until he was home from work, in bed, reading my book. Twice I rose from bed to look outside, searching through the bare trees for signs of headlights in the distance—a shock of blinding yellow against the blackness of night—rambling down the long, winding drive. But there were none. The night was pitch-black, no moon anywhere, not a star to be seen. It seemed to take forever for him to be home.
The bedroom lamp was dimmed, a candle burning on the dresser for ambience, though when he finally did arrive, Aaron took one look at that candle and blew it out, thinking I’d gotten tired and plumb forgot about the burning candle. The small room filled with the noxious smell of smoke as he pulled his chef getup from his body, dropping it to the floor. He climbed into bed beside me, saying how he was so tired, how his feet hurt. His words were slurred with simple lethargy and fatigue. He didn’t bother to turn off the light. I smelled the chophouse on him, the garlic, the Worcestershire sauce, the flesh of chops and steaks.
And yet there it was, another red-circled date on the calendar.
Beneath the blankets I wore a satin robe and beneath the robe nothing, though in it I didn’t feel nearly as sexy as I’d thought I would, as I’d hoped I would, a feeling that was only exacerbated when I untied the ribbon from around my waist, revealing myself to him, and in Aaron’s eyes spied a moment of hesitation, an excuse ready to form on his lips.
“Remember?” I asked, childlike hope in my eyes. “I’m ovulating,” I reminded him, and before he could speak, before he could tell me why it wasn’t a good night, I lowered myself beneath the sheets and easily changed his mind.
I don’t think he minded that I did. In fact, I think he was quite pleased.
When we were through, Aaron pulled away and moved to his side of the bed, leaving me and my elevated hips alone in the hopes that this time, gravity might work its magic.
For three days in a row now it’s gone like this, though tonight Aaron did object and it was much harder to make him acquiesce, and even when he did there was little satisfaction in it, little pleasure, but rather the knowledge that he was doing this for me. Because I wanted him to. Because I was making him do it. There was resentment in it, disgruntlement in his every move. When we were done I offered a pitiful thank you, which felt entirely wrong, as we each drifted to our own side of the bed, an ocean of space spread between us.
It’s become apparent that these days we do it because we have to, not because either of us wants to have sex. We skip any sort of foreplay and get straight to the grunt work, finding sex as pleasurable as brushing teeth or washing dishes. Our movements have become as repetitive and predictable as cleaning laundry.
Just like any other of our daily chores, we’ve begun to grudgingly make love for three days out of the month, finding the other twenty-seven to be a blissful reprieve.
January 9, 1997
Egg Harbor
It took nearly thirty minutes to get to the obstetrician appointment, and all along the way, all I could hear was the grinding of snow beneath the tires’ tread. Outside it was cold, a frosty thirty-two degrees, and the plump clouds looked like they might burst apart at the seams at any moment, burying us with three more inches of snow. Aaron was torn, worried we wouldn’t be home in time for his shift, but feeling the need to go too. To be at the appointment. He vacillated about it for a good five or ten minutes, standing in the open doorway, letting the cold air into our home.
In the end, he decided to go so that as we drove south on Highway 42, both of us quiet, I felt a great guilt about it, knowing that if he was late to work, it would be my fault.
The obstetrician was in Sturgeon Bay, a seventeen-mile drive. He was the closest I could find and also came with a recommendation, one from Miranda, the only woman in town I knew well enough to ask. Miranda, who drove her three boys to my home last week in her Dodge Caravan—windshield caked with ice crystals still, so that it was near impossible to see through the rimy glass—because it was far too cold to walk.
Miranda, who sat sprawled on my sofa, feet raised to the coffee table, while I rocked her crying two-month-old baby, Carter, to sleep.
Miranda, who was so overwhelmed with motherhood that she couldn’t stand to be alone with her own three kids.
Miranda, who revealed to me that she was pregnant again, that it was a mistake this time, that they hadn’t been trying. “Because who in their right mind tries for more when they already have three kids?” she asked, staring at me sadly as if I should take pity on her for this obvious misfortune, but what I felt instead was infuriated and sick, anger and bile rising quickly inside me.
Miranda confessed to me that though she and Joe had waited the recommended six weeks after Carter was born to fool around, sure enough, Joe managed to knock her up on the first try, and already the morning sickness had set in so that her boys were forced to watch even more TV than ever before because Miranda didn’t have the stamina to entertain them all day, let alone feed them. “The nerve of that bastard,” she said of Joe and his evident virility, and then she asked what in the world was taking Aaron and me so long to conceive.
“You don’t think,” she asked, eyes wide, “that you’re infertile, do you? That that handsome husband of yours is shooting blanks?”
As I sat beside him in the car, driving to the obstetrician appointment, listening to the pulverization of snow beneath the wheels, staring at the clouds, I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the case. Was Aaron shooting blanks? Was Aaron infertile?
Aaron, who could do anything, who could fix anything, could not create a child?
Aaron, to whom everything came so easily, had difficulty making a baby?
The thought alone made me angry and annoyed. Angry at Aaron because why, for all the things he was so capable of doing, was he incapable of doing this?