“No,” Damica says. “Just the check.”
“Do you have any walnuts?” Norma asks.
“Walnuts?”
“Walnuts,” Norma confirms.
“No,” the waitress answers. “No walnuts, no pecans, no filberts. No nuts.”
“Walnuts?” Damica asks.
“They get you pregnant.”
“Walnuts get you pregnant?”
“I read it on the Internet.”
Damica curls her mouth into a half-smile like she’s saying, I doubt it. Damica is very pretty, part Dutch, part Puerto Rican, but all of her good looks didn’t make her a genius, so Norma wonders what the hell Damica might know about the health benefits of walnuts. Nothing, she decides. Nothing.
The Baby burps. Damica plants some Eskimo kisses on her newborn’s nose. The Baby does not have a name yet, and its namelessness makes The Baby seem larger than it is, like a hairless, diapered buffalo on her sister-in-law’s lap, having a sip of formula.
They can’t decide and, rather than narrowing, the list of possible baby names grows each day. Part of the problem is that her husband’s brother, Scott—or his name used to be Scott before he changed it to Rider—is very creative. Highlights from the list of names include: Potemkin, Shade, Marble, Electric, Trouble, America, Nautica, Chrysanthemum, Fraction, Frame, and Plaid.
“Nautica?” Norma asked.
“Rider says it means ocean.”
Norma thinks it just means sportswear.
Norma and Damica eat lunch together nearly every day, so they don’t always have to talk. They are used to each other the way people are used to their TV sets. The hum keeps them warm even if they aren’t listening to the broadcast.
Damica was once Damica LaMotteo, but now she and Norma, having married brothers, have the same last name, far less beautiful than LaMotteo. Norma and Damica Jonsen. Plain, but it presents a united front like a uniform Norma puts on every morning, and since Norma has recently lost her job, a uniform feels all right.
Norma enjoys these lunches. If she weren’t here, she’d be glued to her computer, reading posts on Trying to Conceive (TTC) chat rooms.
baby37: thanks to clomid I tried to shove my husband down the stairs yesterday.
infertilems.: just found out health insurance won’t pay for my three $15,000 IVFs that didn’t work wannabb: implantation bleeding? anyone?
baby37: implantation bleeding is a myth spread by women who have no trouble conceiving. there’s no such thing, wannabb. that’s your period whynotme: had one HSG, one D&C and am now using both OPK and BBT while TTC. Any advice?
Norma hasn’t had any tests. She’s never even spoken to her doctor about what is wrong. She knows what’s wrong, or at least she thinks she knows what’s wrong, why she can’t have a baby of her own, and it isn’t something she wants to talk to her doctor about. “Ted’s cheating on me.”
The Baby sits up quickly and draws its eyes wide open, staring across the table at Norma, surprised, the way sleeping cats realize they need to be somewhere else and dash out of a room. The Baby stares at Norma. Norma stares back. All it takes to make a pair of eyeballs is a mother and a father. No Japanese porcelain facility, no Silicon Valley tech lab.
“Oh, come on, Norm. Not this again. Come on.” Norma brings up the topic of Ted’s alleged cheating a lot.
“Why not? Because I have no proof? That doesn’t mean he’s not.”
Ted works all the time. He says he has to, to make the payments on their mortgage, but Norma didn’t even want the stupid mortgage in the first place. Ted recognized a role and started playing it. A few summers back he convinced Norma that they should move into a new development called Rancho de Caza. “Temporarily,” he said. “We won’t spend our whole life living in a development.”
When they moved in, Rancho de Caza was not a gated community. Norma insisted on that. But then the burglaries started and after a thirty-eight-year-old mother from Lilac Lane was lashed to a kitchen chair with duct tape and thrown into her belowground swimming pool, the board of Rancho de Caza changed their minds. Even though the woman lived.
Now when Norma walks home she must stand in front of the guardhouse, wave to the man inside, and then wait while he swings open the wrought-iron gates, big enough for an eighteen-wheeler. Norma, tiny and weak as a mouse, scurries down Day Lily.
*
Norma pulls today’s paper from her purse. Bypassing the front page’s headlines, she flips to page eleven, where her favorite column appears. The local political beat—town hall, zoning boards, Department of Waste Management–type concerns. Lately, Harrison Nembridge, reporter-at-large, has been following a trademark case. Nembridge’s stories are poorly written, full of attendance rosters and incomprehensibly dry legal terms. Still, Norma’s hooked because the case has universal ramifications in a way very few things in her small city do.
The plaintiff is a man named Drake, a onetime lawyer who’d caught the entrepreneurial spirit three years ago when, in his spare time, he began trademarking words from the English language, claiming them for his own use within a certain-mile radius of Norma’s city. He chose simple words like “best” or “with” or, his money maker, “the.” Drake’s represented by the lawyer Linda Kanakas. Linda was two classes ahead of Norma in grade school and Linda was a tough one. The sort of girl everyone knew. Linda was a bully, and while it hasn’t been proven, there was a rumor that when Linda was in junior high she called Immigration Services to report an undocumented man, Hector Donoso. Hector’s daughter, Mary, was dating a debate team star Linda had her eye on. Hector was deported back to Honduras. Mary and her mother had to move into Section 8 housing in another district.
The defendant in the Drake copyright case is Marguerite Eddell, Jim Eddell’s widow. Eddell now owns her dead husband’s auto parts store, House of Mufflers. Linda and Drake are suing Eddell for the unattributed use of the word “of” in all company materials and advertising.
“I have to go,” Damica says. “Will you hold The Baby for a second?”
Norma looks over the edge of the paper. “Yeah. Sure. Just let me pee.” She folds the newspaper.
The stalls of the ladies’ room are made of cool aluminum. Norma rests her head against this coolness while she pees. In the stall wall she can see a distorted reflection. The dark chestnut hair dye she tried last month looks black, and her now black hair, against her pale skin, makes every minor bump and blemish on her face red and raw as if she’d been picking at the imperfections.
Norma is thinking about Damica’s twenty-dollar bill. Norma is wondering why her sister-in-law never pays for lunch. Then Norma feels something peeling away. A streamer of blood sinks to the bottom of the toilet bowl, a dark, dead fish.
*