He was hypnotized. As Dianne undid her large yellow robe, Everett drew back a step from her breasts. The rings framed the lower part of Dianne’s nipples like bibs of silver. Everett had to admit to their beautiful strangeness. “Can I touch?” he asked.
She took a step forward, a vaguely thunderous step. She was growing so big! The doctors must just be guessing about how far along she was—surely it wouldn’t be another four weeks, surely his wife was enormous enough to carry their child to term this very moment. Each night, after hours of tiring cross-exam at the courthouse and wild motions to dismiss, Everett came home to a body a bit different from the one that had greeted him the evening before. It was almost as if he were making contact with, each evening, a new species of alien—Communion, the serial.
“What do you think?”
He didn’t think. Looking was enough; the coloration of Dianne’s nipples: a temperate pink, the color of guava flesh. When he looked at it long enough, the nipple ring and breast began to look like different things altogether: a drainage plug maybe, or a pacifier. Everett set his briefcase down and leaned closer. What would it feel like at night, he wondered, brushing against it by accident? He touched the metal gently and tried to catch his own reflection in the silver, an effort which only left him dizzy.
“Does it hurt? I mean, with, well, the nerves and all, I mean, do you. . .”
Dianne shook her head. “Watch,” she said. She pulled the thin band and let it go. The skin jiggled a bit, as though bouncing on a trampoline. Everett winced, but at no time averted his eyes. Maybe this would be a change he could adapt to—just as he’d had to learn to hold Dianne differently in bed as her stomach blossomed and hardened. Just as there came a day—sometime in early February—when he finally stopped writing the previous year on his checks. He placed his lips around the silver; the cool metal began to melt against his tongue. It was only when her nipple hardened into a column of rigid flesh, when she let fly a breathy, sexual gasp of satisfaction, that he turned angry. “Dianne,” he asked, “how will the baby be able to—you know—nourish itself?”
“It won’t be a problem. I checked it out.”
“Where?”
“At the Piercing Parlor.”
Everett looked in the
direction of the front window; the curtains were drawn. “Oh good.
I’m glad you got the okay from the fine
Dianne became flush. Not from his question but from the tone looming beneath, the underwire of rage. “So what if they’re not?” She turned off a lamp next to Everett’s head. “The hole will close up before she’s born.”
“Before he’s born.”
“Before whichever is born.” Dianne drew her robe, but not before Everett tapped the silver ring once more, examining it with expert impudence.
“That’s not the point,” he said. “You need to think through each decision you make.”
“You think that’s what it’s about,” Dianne said, heading toward the bathroom. She did not slam the door. Everett was used to her rushing off to the toilet. She had to urinate all the time now. She was pissing for two.
Dianne’s bladder control was the only thing that made sense about her since the pregnancy began. Everett had anticipated ice cream cravings, sacrilegious combinations of junk food in the middle of the night. Relinquishing control of the television remote. He had anticipated a ravaged, weary wife, and looked forward to taking care of her. But not this wife, this defiant woman. She he could not have anticipated, and could barely endure. From day to day, Dianne spited Everett’s every suggestion. She exploited his goodwill, and worse, she was living her life heedless of the rules of pregnancy.
It wasn’t enough she got her nipples pierced. That was just the latest incident. She had pulled plenty of other startling things in these past few months. She drank cup upon cup of coffee without eating anything. She exercised in the middle of the night, well past the point of exhaustion. She refused her folic acid supplements because they “made her feel queasy,” and refused to stop taking the topical cream for her acne. Sometimes in the car, Everett would look over to see she was riding without a seat belt. Her lifestyle choices seemed to spit out as free and undirected as buckshot.
It was a dangerous and embarrassing trend. It had begun in a restaurant, the month after they found out they were pregnant. Dianne had unzipped her pants at Yemi’s (why she insisted on wearing pants she couldn’t fit into even before the pregnancy was beyond Everett) and called the waiter over. She told the waiter she was deciding between steak tartar and shepherd’s pie. Thank God he recommended the pie. But still. . .Dianne knew undercooked meat was out. They’d read all those books together. Her behavior, at this juncture, was inconceivable. And it got worse. At cocktail parties she continued drinking well into the second trimester. It disgusted him that she couldn’t stop. Their friends, he knew, were alarmed, probably appalled by Dianne’s behavior, and Everett’s inability to stop it. Everett even thought about switching to juice to get his point across. But why should he have to suffer? Why did she insist on being such a child, now?
Dianne’s distant voice from another room drew Everett back. Who was she speaking with? He checked the kitchen; the cordless phone was lying atop its cradle. He stepped into the bedroom, closing in on the sound. Her voice was sinuous and resonant, in as low a register as his, or lower. She’d undone the laundry he’d folded neatly the night before. It lay tumbled and twisted over itself. Her nylons constricted around his favorite slacks like anacondas.
“What are you”
“Shh!” Dianne hissed, without looking up. She was seated on the toilet, her robe parted open. She was holding their tape recorder. “Now I’ll have to start all over.”
“All over with what?”
She answered not with speech but song. Rewinding the tape to its beginning, she pressed “Record” and crooned into the internal microphone: “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had roast beef, this little piggy had none.” Her voice was a tunnel, unseen, and traveling somewhere. “And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.” She stopped the tape and rose with a satisfied smile. “I’m making a catalogue of lullabies for the baby. In case I don’t make it through the labor, it’ll still have my voice.”
Everett watched her depart. He flushed the toilet. He glanced at their sink top—her toothpaste covered by his cap, his hairbrush with her hairs—the overlapping toiletries. He wanted to stop Dianne and tell her she was crazy for thinking such things. But it was impossible to deny that it did seem that something tragic was going to occur the day she delivered.
Everett invited himself over to his in-laws the weekend after the nipple ring incident. He did it, as with his other visits, on the sly. He’d begun seeing George and Lily Dawles behind his wife’s back going on two months now. Everett knew they were as concerned over Dianne’s behavior as he was. Yvonne, their other child, had produced four healthy grandchildren, and was a sterling mother. And Yvonne had been a mess before motherhood: alcohol problem, a dead-end job, and, though Dianne’s parents never spoke of it, a suicide attempt in high school.
Mrs. Dawles set aside a plate of finger sandwiches and crudités for her husband and Everett in the TV room. “I’m going to freshen up,” Lily said. “And then you’ll tell us all about this...piercing.” Everett watched Lily walk to the guest bathroom. He envisioned the way it looked. The way he felt when he used it, like he was defacing their property. The soaps in there were small and pink and shaped like seashells, and were always manicured--the carved lines defining the shells always clear, as though the soap had only that hour been broken from its box. He hated washing at the Dawles’; even when his hands were clean, Everett felt as if he were leaving dark, greasy stains across the whole house.
“Ah, Arnie, fine mess you got us into.”
“What are we watching, George?”
Mr. Dawles simply flicked his fingers toward the screen in response, as though feeding his hand to the television. It was a Seniors' PGA tournament. Arnold Palmer was using a wedge to claw out of a nasty sand trap. He looked fatigued and hot, like he might collapse right there in the trap.
“You’ve got to control your wife,” Mr. Dawles said, banging two carrot sticks together for emphasis. Dianne’s father ruled the house with a ghostly toughness. He rarely spoke, and when he did, his
comments took the form of prescriptions. He liked his steak fatty and his presidents blustery. When Dianne and Everett became engaged, Paul Tsongas was running for President. Everett remembered the way Mr. Dawles had sneered at the candidate: “That guy can’t fight off a bad cold, let alone a terrorist attack!” Note To Self, Everett had thought at that moment, join gym tomorrow.
Everett tried to imagine Mr. Dawles in a delivery room. Arnold Palmer in the sand trap, a twenty-hour sand trap. He envied his father-in-law, thought his generation blessed. In those days, fathers got these nine months off, free of emotional clutter. They announced themselves to the child only when the child announced itself to them. “I’m not sure, sir, it’s control Dianne needs. . .maybe direction. . .”
“Everett I like you. If you want to pussyfoot around it that’s your business. But we both know the answer.”
“Could you remind me again, what it is?”
“Respect. Take some control of your environment.” Everett nodded dumbly. He thought he had taken control. He spent so much of his time orchestrating the future, the way tomorrow would go. He’d decided on the names. Not that he hadn’t wanted Dianne’s input in the matter, but she was taking the devil’s time making up her mind. Three months was long enough. They were about to be plagued with a living question mark. They needed to stockpile answers, and fast. So he’d decided: Shane for a boy, Allison for a girl. He’d decided where the baby would get christened, which minister would preside.
And they had decided together on the most difficult decision. Not to rely on medicine, no matter how hard the labor. In the end he’d convinced Dianne what was safest and best for the baby: a natural childbirth. And she had nodded her head! After that it all became a downhill escapade. First the drinking. Then Dianne refused to get the ultrasound. Then her parents started waking up to the situation.
Lily walked into the room. Everett offered his chair. Lily declined and took a stool from the bar. “This is better for my posture anyway,” she said.
Mr. Dawles turned to Everett. “Remember what I said to you before your wedding? I’ve never regretted it.”
Everett did remember. Mr. Dawles claimed to have dated his wife’s sister for three months, while knowing the whole time it was Lily he really wanted. By doing this, he claimed Lily would see, firsthand, what George was going to be like, and what he would—and would not—tolerate in a marriage.
But Dianne had never made anyone worry. She’d been a perfect child. Never swiped her father’s credit cards. Used to call her parents from parties where alcohol was served, and ask for a ride home. In some ways she’d never been a child at all—her childhood was devoid of the minor, gangster acts of youth—making this turnabout all the more striking.
“She doesn’t still drink, does she?” Lily asked.
“No, of course not,” responded Everett. “I mean I don’t think.”
“George is right,” Lily whispered, trying to escape her husband’s earshot. “It’s up to you to steer her back. She’ll either learn now or then. Through you, or too late.” Everett heard the gallery cheering an Eagle putt.
George turned around, the leather in his seat twisting and squeezing. “Has this ever happened to you before? With other girlfriends?”
Most of Everett’s old lovers were walking cautionary tales, filled with criminal backgrounds, shady histories, track marks, all of it. He’d loved the botched, engorged anarchy of those women. Everett made a ring around his temple with his finger. “Dianne is different from the others,” he explained, “She isn’t my, you know, usual choice of, well...”
Lily set a finger sandwich down. “Please, Everett. We love you like a child almost, but let’s be realistic about what passes for lunchtime conversation.” Everett liked Lily—she was sensible. She pretended not to know the temptations of the world, not to care for them. When he looked at Lily, he saw a matured version of Dianne, and it pleased him. He could envision a time, of course, when Lily’s obsequious way of clinging to manners and customs would drive him batty (as it had Mr. Dawles), just as he could envision feeling someday the same grating feelings for Dianne. But that was a better fate to face than a life lived with a woman on edge, a woman who every moment exuded airs of secrecy, a woman like any of those he’d had before Dianne. Besides, before it began to annoy him, Everett was sure both of them would feel settled in, fit in their security, on the receding grade of the arc of time.
On his way back home from the Dawles’, Everett stopped at the corner deli for a pint of bottled water. The heat in the store made him upgrade to a quart. Two high school girls were working the register, smacking gum, their every move being slurped up by a couple of young boys with smooth faces and thin necks.
Everett approached the counter, and the girls rang him up. One of the boys gave way to Everett and his bottled water, then raised his voice. “So what are you saying, we’re not good enough?”
“No, that’s not it, right? I just want to see what it’s like, you know. Just to see. If it’s different with a black guy.”
“So this prom guy is black?”
“Who is this?” the second boy demanded. “He goes here?”
“No, he’s white, he’s white. This year he’s white. The guy I wanted didn’t ask me. But I got my bead on him.”
The other girl came alive. “Shandra went with Mateen last year, almost caused a race riot. That’ll be $1.50, please, sir.” She held her hand out for Everett’s money, her second and third fingers extended, the other two and the thumb, curled in.
“What about one of us?” the first boy pleaded.
“Nuh-uh,” the first girl said. “As for you, no way, and as for you, you had your chance, and you were no good, honey. You got to satisfy me quick or not at all.”
The second girl laughed and returned to Everett two quarters. “Have a nice day.”
When he’d left the store, Everett couldn’t remember in which direction he was supposed to be going. He circled the trashcan twice, trying to remember if he’d thrown away the cap to the water bottle. No. It was in his hands. Was that his future in there? Would his son or daughter become one of those? Maybe he was witnessing a preview of the birth. Maybe his wife was acting out the qualities of the child growing inside her. A child who eventually would grow into one of those girls, or worse. Heedless to reason. Not at all like Dianne. My baby, the poltergeist.
Back in the bathroom, there was blood in the sink. Red stains on the shower curtain. The basin was filled with it; it was dark and motionless and smelled of wet salt, like a lake at night. Everett dipped his fingers in and lifted them. This was no mistake. This was blood.
A piece of Everett’s past awoke from the dead to become, for a moment again, clear as the present. Once, in college, he and his frat brothers had thrown bottles of grenadine at the wall in a drunken spectacle. The stains dripped and swiveled down the wall. Before receiving their university reprimand, they had bought a gilded frame and had nailed it up around the stains. He recalled the whole celebratory affair. How proudly his housemates had gazed at the damage. The perfect, beautiful contrast of scarlet on white. Modern art. Everett cupped the blood in his hands. He thought of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, all the women who had at some point snapped apart. Dianne’s sister Yvonne. He grabbed towels out of the linen closet—so many, as many as he could, some not even towels, just sheets and rags—and ran to the kitchen.
“Don’t walk in with bare feet!” Dianne pointed to the floor. It was covered with glass shards.
“I’m wearing shoes.” He stepped toward her, but her arms flailed sharply, like blades of knives. Her movements were rejuvenated, quick. She made him feel off-balance.
“Don’t walk in just yet. I dropped my glass. I’ve got to pick up.”
Everett shook his head; he handed her a frayed dishrag and told Dianne to wrap up the wound. He stared at the spilt water beneath her sandals. On the counter, like a frozen bear claw, the intact bottom half of the glass stood upright for Everett. “How much blood have you lost?”
“No, no, no, just a teaspoon, baby,” Dianne said. “I swear. The sink is filled with water. I just put my hand in there to flush out the glass. Don’t come near a sec, okay?”
Dianne’s lips were thin and dull, and moist and brown, like a strand of Everett’s hair. She stepped gingerly; glass crackled beneath her like dry twigs. “You’re going to get infected,” he said, stepping toward her, “You’ve got to let me take care of you.”
He took Dianne and moved her away from the glass, his hands planted firmly on her hips. He held his wife like a razor, gently, at arm’s length, with severe caution.
George, Lily, and Everett held their collective breath as they awaited the doctor’s report on the health of Allison. But the statistics, when announced, all sounded nearly precisely the same—baby 19 inches long, 7lbs, 7oz, Apgar scores a perfect string of twos (muscle tone: active motion; irritability: cough; respiratory: crying and spontaneous breath)—as Everett had read about in the books. Twenty-four hour labor, born at 6:32 p.m. The blue eyes were reactive to the hospital lights, which were as harsh and sharp as thistles.
Everett’s parents arrived an hour later. Their bickering over whose fault it was that they were late filled the delivery room with gaiety it otherwise would not have held. The two tussled over who had read the map wrong, and if you hadn’t insisted on buying coffee versus well I wasn’t the one who left the camera in the diner’s bathroom, was I? The blame sounded careless and balmy and inessential, and proved a relief to the interminable noiselessness of the previous hour.
Up until that point, little had been said. Everett seemed more exhausted than his wife, and he confined himself mainly to squatting beneath Dianne’s hand. The cut from her hand was already healed, except for a faint line beneath the epidermis, like a pencil marking. Lily and George had taken turns sitting in the room’s one chair. A giving and taking of comfort. While the other might have thought to sit on the corner of Dianne’s bed, they never did. Even the baby seemed aware of the reclusive state of things: after wailing for a few minutes, she coiled her voice and shut her eyes until a nurse gathered her up and took her away for tests.
The worst thing about Everett’s parents visiting was that, eventually, they had to cut the visit short, returning to everyone the custody of themselves. They did not want this privilege. Back at Dianne and Everett’s home, Lily took sips from a diet soda. George thrust his hands into the deep pockets of his stovepipe pants. He made an occasional gesture to wink at Allison, or was it Dianne he was winking at?
And Everett flashed back to the taxi ride to the hospital. At one point, stuck in traffic, there was nothing to do but watch the other stuck people and hope you were moving just a little faster through it all than they. He’d watched a minivan slow to a crawling stop beside a man wearing overlong trousers. The man pointed north. He held up three fingers, signifying stoplights. He had said, “And that’ll take you straight into the tunnel.” The minivan sailed on. In that moment, Everett imagined the act he’d just witnessed—the giving of directions to another human being--to be the most graceful and bounteous act one person could grant to another, helping someone travel further along, discover their destination in one quick and calming stroke.
But it was all bullshit. If only Everett and his in-laws felt blameless enough to speak freely, they would learn that. But they were helpless, in some way, to the desire they knew they had felt, a lust to see Allison born with a defect. Each had wished for some minor blight on the baby’s body, one risk she would be exposed to all her life, some punishment with which Dianne would have to reckon, the fate of her glib disobedience.
“Ev, will you get the camera?” Dianne was wrapping her first diaper. Everett wasn’t sure that was something he wanted recorded for posterity, but he did not argue with the whims of Dianne’s rhapsody.
Dianne shrieked, stomping
her foot heavily on the floor.
“Rat! Rat! God, get it away from her!” Everyone stared at the ground, sober and
confused. Lily bent down and picked up a
length of black extension cord. “This is
what you stepped on, honey,” she said.
She lifted it to Dianne’s face, so she would know what it was and what
it was not. “When Everett got up, his
chair tugged it along. Some of the cord
was bundled up by your feet, and that’s what you saw moving. That’s all it was. Without your contacts on, I guess it might
look like a rat. But it’s a cord. That’s all it is.” Dianne blushed. She told Everett to come back to her, that they
would just watch this diaper changing, take pictures of the next changing and
pretend it was the first. By the time
they got the film developed, maybe their memories might fracture enough to
forget the difference. Dianne rolled the
bottom of the cloth into a tight hem.
The others breathed on her arms and looked down at her handiwork. Outside on the street, women and men made way
for one another. Four children
Double-Dutched in the adjacent park, reciting rhyme and moving rope in an
agreed and spinning spectrum. A bit up
the road, a meter maid excused a driver’s violation of a parking ordinance. She
tore the ticket in thirds after hearing his plea for leniency. The whole world, except for that room in that
moment, seemed to be flying by lightly, passing easily through the barriers of
change.
About the Prize Winner:
Matthew Pitt was born is St. Louis – the morning after Nixon’s resignation – and has paid rent in such cities as Austin, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Currently he is pursuing an M.F.A. at New York University, where he is a New York Times Fellow in Fiction. His work has appeared recently in Prism International, Inkwell, and Grasslands Review, and has received awards from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York Stories. His story, “Natural Child,” was the winner of this year’s Touchstone graduate fiction award.
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