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The simple truth was that like most people, Margaret did not think much about any of this. The new act focused on those who held un-American views—but she was doing nothing of the sort. She was buying a table runner, warm slippers, a new bedspread. Magazines were printing again, showing beautiful people and beautiful lives to ogle and emulate; it was possible once more to dine at a restaurant, to have a white-shirted waiter pour you wine. Like everyone, she was trying to build a new, shiny, beautiful life. What could be more American?
A house, a husband. A yard ringed by a fence. Two kinds of boots, rubber for puddles, fur-lined for snow. Scented candles and trivets, a recycling bin, an electric toothbrush, all the paraphernalia of domestic life. All the things she thought she’d been happy to escape. If someone had told her at twenty where she’d be five years later, she would have laughed in their faces, to hear that she not only had these things again, but that she wanted them. Craved them. The only part she would have believed was Bird: she’d always wanted a child. Back in Ethan’s tiny apartment they’d daydreamed, the two of them, imagining what their child would be like. Soon, to their delight, they would find out.
Inside her, Bird began to grow. The size of a lentil. The size of a pea. The size of a walnut, then a lemon. Each morning Ethan kissed her belly, just above the navel, before heading to work. A year ago, she and Domi would have been standing face-to-face, gripping their handlebars, steeling themselves for the gauntlet of the day. Armor check, they called it, and that was all they would say. Not goodbye, not see you later, though it meant all those things. Margaret might straighten the collar of Domi’s scuffed leather jacket; Domi might tug Margaret’s scarf higher over her throat, hiding her face. Armor check, each of them would say, before riding away. Packed into those two words: take care, come back safe, I love you.
Now, in the quiet house, southern sun and sparrow song pooling through the windows, she wore a long soft dress, under which Bird was just beginning to swell. Woolly slippers in which she could not run. Earrings. There was no need for armor here, yet she missed Domi most in these moments, when she remembered there was no more need for toughness.
Ethan’s parents came for a visit, and Margaret made up the second bedroom—soon to be the nursery—with clean white sheets. In the kitchen, his mother taught her how to make shepherd’s pie, Ethan’s childhood favorite. Through the doorway, Ethan watched them, aproned and haloed in the afternoon light, Margaret holding a wooden spoon in one hand as she jotted notes on an index card with the other, his mother setting her free hand on the growing round of Margaret’s stomach, so tenderly it might have been a baby’s head.
Bird grew: the size of a peach, a mango, a melon. How to understand it, these mystifying sensations, the baffling new phenomenon that was her body? Margaret headed for the public library—now reopened, thanks to private donations—down streets softly humming once more. Stores had reopened, too, one by one, selling fancy notebooks and candy and jewelry; there were people strolling the sidewalks again. It was like the first days of spring after a long and snowy winter, everyone hungry to not be alone. For a brief glorious moment, strangers smiled at each other in passing, so happy to see one another: You’re still here? Me, too! Still relieved, back then, not yet afraid. Glints of red, white, and blue on everyone’s collars and coats.
In the library, nothing had been removed yet; everyone was simply happy to have books again. The young librarian at the counter pointed her to shelf after shelf: Margaret wanted to know much more than what to expect, and at night, as they lay in bed, she read tidbits to Ethan. Mother pandas crawled into a den alone; for the first months of the cub’s life there was no other world but the dark snug den, no other creature but its mother. Cuckoos crept into other birds’ nests, laid their eggs among strangers, and flew away, trusting the other mothers to raise their young as their own. The octopus laid its eggs in strings, like long garlands of pearls, guarded them until her death, starving as she blew air across them to keep them alive.
She grew larger. From within, Bird thrummed against her: his heels the mallets, her belly the drum. She could feel his hiccups, a microscopic ping. When he turned over, she felt the movement inside her stillness. What’s it feel like, Ethan asked, wondrous, and she tried to explain: what the ocean floor felt as the waves rolled out, then in. The librarian slid another book across the counter toward her as she ventured farther and farther from shore. Some fish needed no mate, laid eggs and hatched them alone, every fishling a perfect copy of its mother. Some single-celled creatures simply divided, neatly unzipping themselves in two. Each week, another book, another marvel. Another piece of the eternal mystery, life’s need to make more life. From the animal world to the plant: Milkweed trees sent their seeds aloft on the wind, to grow far from home; pinecones flared open at their mother’s feet, a skirt of stubby seedlings scrabbling for space and light. Succulents would grow anew from a broken-off leaf, pushing roots out into the air, then down into the soil: a piece of its own body, transformed into its child. She thought of the Bible verse her own mother had once made her recite, for Sunday school: bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
She found mothers everywhere, even in the garden, tending her plants. When the frost is coming, she learned, the way to ripen tomatoes on the vine is to twist their roots. Pull until the earth cracks, until the spider-hairs below snap like cut strings. This tells the plant: Your end is near—save what you can. Give up on growing taller; give up on leafing wide. Think only of the fruit, dangling in hard green fists. Exhaust yourself. Let your leaves shrivel and yellow. Nothing else matters. Push until there is nothing left of you but a dry stalk holding a round red globe aloft. Wither, pushing that one sweet fruit into ripeness, hoping that in summer something of you will sprout again.
Wakened at night by Bird’s restless somersaults, she wrote: tender things that clung to one another, tentatively, like fish eggs. One poem, two. Then a dozen. Then enough for a book. One of those nights, Bird eight and a half months in her belly, she’d had a craving. That morning Ethan had bought her a pomegranate, and she tore it in bloody halves with her hands. They’d finally come available again, after the Crisis, and it felt like the luxury it was, heavy with tiny gemstones. Glistening seeds showered onto the floor, red droplets splashed on the tile. How many trees might spring from that one hard globe? This was its job, she understood suddenly: to create all these seeds, and then to explode. From within, Bird kicked at her, gently this time. As if playing a game. Did the pomegranate know, she thought, did it ever wonder where they went, how they turned out. If they’d ever managed to grow. All those bits of its missing heart. Scattered, to sprout elsewhere.
When the book was finished, this would be the poem on the last page.
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