When Norma once asked Damica how long it took her to get pregnant, Damica said, “I don’t know. How long does it take? Fifteen minutes?” So Norma said, “No. I mean, how many times did you have to try?” And Damica said, “Try? What do you mean, honey?”
Norma and Ted have been trying for over two years. Each time Norma gets her period, strength leaks out of her. Iron and blood. Sex feels like death.
She can hardly blame Ted for finding a girlfriend. Maybe she should look for a boyfriend. Maybe he could get her pregnant. Maybe none of this matters at all—love, babies, marriage.
She rests her forehead on the aluminum. She pokes her belly sharply. “Wake up.” She speaks to her ovaries, imagining them as something crinkled and squished, like the wicked witch’s feet underneath the tornado house. GIVE ME A CALL. 1-800-FUCKIN’A is scratched into the bathroom wall. Still seated on the toilet, Norma digs her cell phone out from the bottom of her purse. She dials.
“Hello?”
“Hi. 1-800-FUCKIN’A?”
“No, I’m sorry. You’ve reached 1-800-DUBL-INC. Doubles Incorporated, providing goods and services for the Procreation by Division Industries.”
“Procreation by division?”
“Yeah. You know, like the amoebae.”
Norma hangs up quickly.
*
Norma pays for Damica’s lunch and on her walk home she takes a left off Dead Elm Street onto Larre Road, pronounced “Larry.” Norma presses her fingers hard into the corners of her eyes. Crying is something she started doing after the first year of trying to have a baby. Now she is really good at crying. She doesn’t even have to practice in front of the mirror anymore. Larre Road is a great place to cry, as very few people come this way.
Her city allowed for generous strips of grass between the sidewalks and the street. These greenways are mandatorily maintained by the business or homeowner who lives nearby. They have in the past been canvases for competing civic landscaping pride. But down here on Larre Road there are no businesses. There are old farms and fallow fields. The sidewalks make reverse mohawks through tall yellow grass high as Norma’s waist. If a car were to drive past, Norma would appear to be swimming in a sea of yellow and green. That is, if Norma didn’t duck down and hide in the grass each time a car approached.
Norma no longer owns a car because no one told her to change the oil. They kept that information a big secret and she ruined the engine of the used Ford Escort Ted had bought her. She blew the head gasket. Now she can’t stand people who have cars that work. Everyone has a baby and everyone drives a car with perfectly functioning air conditioners. No one has their windows rolled down. They want to make sure their babies are comfortable in their air-conditioned car seats.
A little killing bit each day.
Shutting off one nostril at a time, Norma blows her nose into the grass. Then her crying is over for today.
Larre Road is not a direct route home, but it is quiet and golden for now. The housing developments haven’t moved in here yet, though telltale plastic orange surveyor’s ribbons dot the way. They’ll be here soon. In recent years the city has been spreading out, grabbing land like a desperate hand sinking in quicksand, trying to take all the ground down with it. Soon there will be nothing left that is unknowable, unlit, and mysterious. There will be no more of the dark dark.
Today Larre Road is deserted and sunny. It is warm and peaceful. It reminds Norma of junior high, after lunch. She’d return to her classroom to find that the afternoon activity included a filmstrip. “Digestion and You,” or “Mammals!” As the teacher dimmed the lights Norma would slip into a trance that wasn’t sleep but borrowed from sleep’s best aspects, like being able to fly or make out with the kid seated behind you, and no one else in class would see your young bodies writhing together underneath the desks in a mass of sixth-grade flesh. Larre Road is a secret tunnel back to a land of peaceful, warm sixth-grade afternoons. Norma can almost hear someone saying, “Psst. C’mon. This way.” And into the tunnel she goes.
A rustling speeds up behind her quickly. From around the bend in the sidewalk comes a woman riding a boy’s BMX bike. The woman’s age is hard to guess. Her face is sharp. The blades of her cheekbones could cut, as they’ve been accentuated by two brutish swaths of rouge, leaving sallow caverns around her mouth. The woman wears her hair feathered back with a rolled bandana across her forehead. Olivia Newton John, let’s get physical. The woman looks tough, dirty, and perhaps a bit deformed. Her eyes are watery and distracted as a drug addict’s. Her body is disconcertingly tiny, like a ten-year-old body has been grafted onto a forty-year-old head.
Norma doesn’t know this woman so she thinks prostitute, no, drug dealer. No, prostitute.
They are the only two people on Larre Road but the woman stares straight ahead as if Norma weren’t there at all. The woman clenches a cigarette between her lips, one hand on the handlebars, one hand dangling by her side. She doesn’t blink, and in a fast breeze she glides past Norma and is gone.
Creepy, Norma thinks, but creepy like a humongous pile of insects crawling on top of one another, a pile of insects Norma would want to poke from afar with a long stick.
Larre Road changes from meadow to pine forest. The air turns damp and the sidewalk is darker with moss. The sky is blocked by pine boughs that keep her best thoughts from escaping up into the atmosphere. She follows Larre Road up to the driveway of the old hospital. It’s been closed for twenty years. When she was a kid, she’d heard it was haunted. The hospital sits like a gray frog on top of a small hill. Its windows are fenced by wrought iron. It was built as a mansion in 1927 by the explorer Dirmuid Grady, after a trip through the Sangla Valley, where Grady and his party had been looking for Shangri-la, the forbidden and fictional city. Of the twenty-seven people in Grady’s outfit, five returned alive. The others had been picked off by illnesses and accidents as if they were a dish of hard candies God was enjoying one by one.
Grady built this gray frog of a house and lived in it for seven months before he himself tripped on an unsecured flagstone, tumbled into the empty concrete swimming pool, and landed in the deep end.
The state bought the mansion for nothing and turned it into a hospital for troubled minds. When Norma was thirteen, the last doctor presided over the last troubled mind, a man named Walter, who confessed he wasn’t actually troubled but had come to the sanitarium because he was lonely. The doctor proposed that the two of them should enter retirement together somewhere in the tropics. Walter, the patient, agreed. Page eleven reported the story.