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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587292743 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/1998 |
| Series: | John Simmons Short Fiction Award Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 138 |
| File size: | 390 KB |
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Chapter One
Magic Acts
Daphne sometimes says her sister, Lila, is the mother she never had. In fact, Daphne and Lila's mother is alive and quick with maternal affection, but Daphne feels more comfortable going to her sister when things go wrong. Their mother displays an eagerness for bad news that can be unnerving. "Oh no," she says when the story has barely begun, and while Daphne is still telling her story she can already hear the echo of her mother passing the news on to her friends. Daphne hears which details her mother will fix on, which events will become confused and transformed--"Now, I don't remember if she said it was her friend's brother or her father who was bringing the lawsuit"--and she feels herself becoming frustrated. Their mother, who believes in the evolution of the soul over lifetimes, takes the long view. If things are not better next week or next year, they undoubtedly will be the next time around.
Daphne's sister, who believes in the restorative powers of moping and self-pity, knows how to sympathize. When Daphne calls and feels edgy with tears, when just dragging her voice across that unhappy throat is enough to make her cry, Lila says, "Daph? Oh, honey, what is it? Do you want to come up?"
So Daphne is on her way up to the city to spend the weekend with Lila and Gwen. She's been feeling tired lately--even now, at sixty-five miles an hour on the crowded freeway, she feels dangerously close to sleep and has to keep clenching different muscle groups to keep herself awake--and she's looking forward to stretching out on the sunny carpet of Lila's apartment. Lila is that kind of housekeeper, Daphne thinks--you look forward to her floor. When they were younger and shared a room, Lila ran a strip of masking tape down one wall and along the carpet to the door, dividing the room exactly in half. In the week this experiment lasted, the room looked like a before-and-after ad from a women's magazine.
Lila and Gwen have jobs that Daphne doesn't quite understand, jobs it seems you could do only in a city, where there's so much money flying around you just have to build the right sort of net to catch some of it. Lila has a business called Make It Perfect, which helps people plan everything from first dates to New Orleans-style funerals, and Gwen works as an office-efficiency consultant. People tell her they need to know where to put the Xerox machine or the coffee station, and once she's there, they close their office door and complain about their coworkers. "The Xerox machine is the symptom," she says, "but figuring out who to let go is usually the cure."
When Gwen opens the apartment door to Daphne's knock, Daphne thinks again of her pet theory that Gwen has merged sex and efficiency in a wholly marketable way. She's wearing a simple black jumpsuit and wooden sandals with black velvet thongs that look like something worn in countries where people still sleep / when they're tired and eat when they're hungry, and her blond hair curls under cooperatively just above her shoulders.
"Baby Daphne's here!" Gwen calls out, holding her arms open for Daphne to step into a hug. Gwen has no family--"unless you count my mother," she always adds, without further explanation--and she has aggressively adopted Lila's. Lila and Daphne's parents, who loved Gwen when they thought she was Lila's friend and blamed her when they learned she was Lila's lover, have now warmed to her again. The string of disastrous men Daphne has brought home over the years has probably helped, as Gwen points out. Gwen's grateful for that, but now that things are going better she keeps trying to get Daphne to find a nice man. "Alcoholics and egomaniacs are fine when you're starting out," she says. "But you don't want to let them become a habit."
"Spencer is neither of those things."
"Spencer is married, Daphne. I don't really consider that a step in the right direction."
There's a smell of sage and garlic coming from the kitchen, and Lila appears, wiping her hands on a towel. She's got about a dozen different pieces of clothing on--an undershirt and over that a shirt and vest, a short skirt giving way to tights and eventually socks--all of it gray and green and brown. She looks as though she's been dressed by children, or birds. But the effect is soothing, beautiful actually. She gives Daphne a kiss on the mouth, as always; in the thirty years Daphne has had to get used to this, she never quite has.
Lila offers her a champagne drink, pale gold with a stain of red at the bottom, a tiny alcoholic imitation of the sunset outside. Daphne has an instinctive moment of resistance in reaching for the glass, but then she reminds herself that it won't matter anyway, and she takes a sip before setting it aside. Lila and Gwen sit next to each other on the couch; Daphne stretches out on the flowered carpet, the spot she's been looking forward to, and closes her eyes. In that moment the idea, the wish, that she might just be late falls away. She knows.
"We have news," Gwen says. "Guess."
Daphne pulls herself to her elbows and looks at them, holding hands like children. She feels that familiar stab of love. "You found a nice, handsome, funny single man and you've invited him to dinner."
"Yes, actually, but that's not the news."
"Lila! You didn't, did you?"
"Oh, Daph, he's nobody, just somebody I work with. I mean he's wonderful, that's why we asked him, but he's nothing to get excited about. Unless you like him, I mean."
"God, Lila. He's not a clown, is he? You know I hate clowns." Daphne drops to the floor again and tries to imagine what this handsome funny nobody might look like. As always when she is trying to think of any other man, she imagines Spencer.
"He's a magician," Lila says. "And very sweet."
"In other words, not your type," Gwen puts in. Daphne's eyes are dosed again when she feels the toes of Gwen's bare foot nuzzling her ribs. "Daphne, we're trying to break some major news to you here. You want to hear it or not?"
"You're having a baby," Daphne says impulsively, to hear what the words sound like.
And when her sister says, "That's right! You must be psychic!" Daphne feels something deep inside her turning on its axis.
"Well, we're not having a baby yet," Gwen says. "We're going to start trying. We're getting into the baby business."
When Daphne first got involved with Spencer, she went through a phase of imagining what it would be like to have a child with him--a perfect creature with his black hair and quick reflexes, her green eyes and knack for Romance languages. But that phase passed, and one day she realized that she didn't want a baby; at best, she wanted to want one. It's the virtues of motherhood that she wants: to feel an affinity with women who cheerfully take on the unimaginable task of being responsible for another human being; to feel at ease when her friends offer encouragingly, "Want to hold him?" She wants to have opinions about how long to nurse and whether to let them cry. She wants to go weak at the sight of one sleeping; even the men she knows--fathers--talk about that.
Spencer has two teenage boys, one of whom, Ben, is a student in Daphne's tenth-grade English class. He's built like his father--lean, with big hands--and he has Spencer's habit of flipping a pencil end over end through his fingers when he's thinking; sometimes when Daphne's at the board and her eyes sweep the classroom for signs of life, she sees him doing this, and the idea of Spencer shudders briefly through her nervous system. Ben is a good student, especially for a boy, but he can be careless, and she often finds herself writing "I know you can do better than this" on his compositions.
It was through Ben that Daphne first met Spencer, at parents' night. She had delivered her carefully prepared twenty-minute speech, leaning heavily on phrases like critical-thinking skills and increasingly fluent command of the conventions of English, trying not to think what an absurd description this was for what actually went on in her class, where she tried to slip commercials for grammar and paragraph structure into class-long arguments about rap and new movies. Spencer came up to her afterwards, and Daphne thought he was going to ask her whether she really thought an in-depth discussion of the latest voyage of the starship Enterprise was going to boost his son's SAT scores. But he held out his hand for her to shake and told her that his son liked her class. His wife was very sick, he said, and it meant a lot to him to know that his son had her class to look forward to every day.
They were standing near the door. Out in the hallway, disoriented adults wandered by, checking room numbers against the schedules they held in their hands. Daphne felt a wave of tenderness break over her. She had a moment of loving everything that she could see: these parents, milling from room to room like children on Halloween; the rows of banged-up lockers and the checkerboard linoleum floor; this man with the sick wife whose son actually liked her class.
Later they ran into each other outside and stood talking while the parking lot emptied around them. In the darkness Spencer's voice had the softly burred quality of sanded wood. He sounded like a man worn down to whatever was underneath. They faced each other with their arms crossed and eventually backed apart without touching, but when he asked if he could call her sometime, she found herself saying, "Please do."
Daphne is still lying on Lila's floor, her feelings pulsing like a headache, when Sam the magician arrives. He's short, about her height, and he's got either a goatee or a Vandyke, Daphne's not sure which.
Oh God, she thinks, it's going to be a long night. But there's something endearing about what he does when they're introduced, showing her his empty hand and then reaching gently behind her ear to come up with a tiny pink shell.
"Look what I found," he says, presenting it to her.
At dinner Gwen describes the baby project. "We're going with donor insemination," she says, "otherwise known as the turkey-baster method."
"Lila's going to be the bastee," Sam says.
"You seem to know a lot about it." Daphne feels suddenly annoyed by Sam's hearty approval.
"For a while we were talking about Sam being the donor," Lila says.
"Then we came to our senses," Sam adds, winking.
Daphne is shocked by what she finds herself thinking: Him? A short magician?
"The books say choosing a friend can be risky," Lila says. "So we decided to play it safe."
"By picking a stranger?" Daphne says.
"You should see the paperwork on this stuff," Gwen says. "The clinic probably knows more about its donors than most women know about their husbands."
"Some consolation." Daphne suspects she is going to look back on this conversation and wish she had been more gracious.
Fortunately, Sam is there, with an instinct for what's needed. He raises his glass. "I think it's great," he says. "The miracle of birth gets more miraculous all the time. You two are going to make some baby very happy."
Lila has to work the next day, so Daphne rides to the clinic with Gwen. On the way there, Gwen says, "Something about this whole idea bothers you, doesn't it?"
The little red-and-white cooler, packed with dry ice and nestled in the gully between their seats, makes Daphne feel as if they should be going on a picnic, not a serious errand of procreation. She flips the handle absentmindedly back and forth. "If I tell you what it is, will you promise not to tell my sister?" she says.
"No."
Daphne lets out a disappointed sigh. She realizes how much she wants to tell Gwen, to tell somebody. "It's not about you, it's about me," she says.
"That's usually the case, in my experience."
For a while they don't talk, and Daphne watches Gwen weave expertly through the city traffic. Lila once said it was Gwen's driving that sold her: "I thought, 'This is a woman I would trust with my life.'" Lila and Daphne are terrible drivers; they both hit the brake reflexively when the light turns yellow, then punch the accelerator.
"How did you know you wanted this?" Daphne says.
"For a long time I didn't want it. And then something happened, I guess. I just started noticing babies. It was like when you hear a new word for the first time and that week you hear it three different times. It seemed like babies were everywhere. I'd be talking to a client about setting up a better interoffice mail system and all of a sudden I'd find myself thinking Sean, Jeremy, Heather. Baby names."
They're stopped at a light and Daphne looks out her window at a man and his dog on the sidewalk, both sitting on a filthy square of pink carpet. On a small piece of cardboard is written "Only Through Your Generosity Do My Dog And I Eat." Daphne is struck by the formality of the message, and, as always, by the presence of the sleeping dog.
There but for the grace of God, she thinks, but she doesn't really believe it. Nothing in her life has ever brought her close enough to the edge that she could begin to imagine what it would be like to fall off. Nevertheless she is struck by the unfairness of it. Sometimes she wishes agents of the government, clean-shaven men in drab suits, would just come to her apartment and take all the things she can't bring herself to give away but feels guilty for owning: her stereo, her exercise bike, her clothes and books and cupboards full of food.
She's feeling nauseated by the time Gwen pulls into the clinic parking lot, so she decides not to go in. Instead she walks the two blocks back to the man and his dog. On the way, she takes three dollar bills out of her purse and puts them in her pocket, so that she won't have to go through her wallet in front of him. She doesn't want him to see the other bills, how much more she could be giving but isn't. Why three dollars? Four seems cumbersome, so close that it might as well be a five-dollar bill; but five dollars is too much, somehow. Five dollars you would remember later, you would miss.
She walks up to them on the corner and bends down to drop the folded bills into a paper coffee cup. The cup is empty except for a dime and nickel lying on the bottom, and she feels suddenly embarrassed to be leaving so much. She finds herself hoping that no one is watching. When the man says, "God bless you," she thanks him and pats the dog's head.
For the drive home, Gwen puts the cooler with its new cargo of three plastic straws on the floor behind the driver's seat and snugs it in place by wrapping her jacket around it.
"Gwen, it's sperm, not nitroglycerin." Daphne can hear an impatience in her voice that she didn't intend.
"I just don't want anything to happen to it," Gwen says, managing to sound both proud and sheepish, already like a new mother.
Daphne watches Gwen settle into her seat and reach for the ignition. She opens her mouth and finally the words that have been cooped up in her head come flying out: "I'm pregnant, I think."
Gwen leans back in her seat. They're strapped in like astronauts, and for a moment Daphne expects them both to just blast off.
In the ten seconds that she could say a number of wrong things, Gwen says nothing. Then she turns toward Daphne as far as the seat belt will allow and says, "Do you want to be?"
Daphne shakes her head and Gwen nods in response. They go on like that too long, until Gwen finally says, "Weird timing, huh?" and Daphne starts to cry.
Gwen doesn't throw herself on Daphne like a blanket, the way Lila would, to smother her unhappiness. Instead, she takes Daphne's left hand and holds it in her right, as though together they were about to cross the world's busiest street. They sit like that for a while, staring out the windshield at the mural painted on the clinic wall: women of all races standing together, some with children and some without, all smiling.
"Are you okay?" Gwen asks finally. When Daphne nods, Gwen gives her hand a squeeze before letting it go to start the car.
On the way home, Daphne looks out the window at the people passing each other on the sidewalk and thinks, distractedly, that it's a picture of inefficiency somehow--each person coming from a place someone else needs to go. "I keep thinking of something I read once about dogs," she says. "About how every dog likes to play the same trick of bringing the stick back to someone other than the person who threw it. The dog thinks that's a great joke, apparently." She glances at Gwen. "I feel like someone brought me Lila's stick."
"I'm not sure what we're talking about here," Gwen says carefully, picking each word out of the air separately, "but these two things don't really have anything to do with each other. They're not connected. You understand that, don't you?"
Daphne decides not to tell Lila yet, and Lila doesn't press her about what's wrong but gives her another hearty dinner. On Sunday morning, watching her sister zigzag around the kitchen, Daphne feels a powerful pull to spend the day with the two of them, sprawled horizontally across big, soft chairs and listening to music, pretending they might eventually go out and do something worthwhile. But she knows the only thing worse than going home to an empty apartment on Sunday is going home to it on Sunday night. She can see herself opening her front door and sending her hand out in the dark to scout the wall for the light switch, her overnight bag hanging heavy on her shoulder, and she knows that vacant, lonely moment is worth avoiding.
Daphne watches Lila pack up a loaf of banana bread and a stack of detective novels for her sister to take home. Most of Lila's hair is tied back with what looks like a paisley necktie, and she's dressed in some intermediary stage between night and day that involves a kimono worn over a pair of pants. She looks to Daphne like something in the process of becoming something else, and Daphne sees ourselves from reaching. She thinks of the things she could not undo without undoing her life, and she hopes that something their mother is fond of saying is right: that being healed does not always require finding the cure.
Table of Contents
Contents Magic Acts Appetites Damages Driving Home The Future Tense Dreaming before Sleep Friendly Fire The World with My Mother Still in It As Needed All These Gifts My Real LifeWhat People are Saying About This
These stories about common human experiences of romance, friendship, family are rich with witty, devastating observations....Kathy Chetkovich's touch is deft, affectionate, and very funny. -- Author of Jealous-Hearted Me
[Chetkovich] is the kind of crafty writer who makes it seem so easy. I read her the way I eat an apple -- grateful that something so close to home can be so exquisite.