ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RACHEL RICHARDSON, a native of Tulsa, studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her first full-length manuscript, Ampersand, debuted in the spring of 2009.

Circulation

By Rachel Richardson


E.B. asks when it started going weird with Harper. I don’t have to think about this.

“When the L.L. Bean catalogue came. The winter one.” 

E.B. does not need me to point out that it is now April, and that we are enjoying lunch at Coit Tower, overlooking the Bay—I have grocery store sushi, she, homemade hummus on some type of bread I can’t pronounce. E.B. is always extracting four-course snacks from her lunch bag ever since she took a night course at the Culinary School over in Potrero Hill.

“Harper had it propped up on her stomach—she was only two months along then, but you could tell—and started tearing out photos of these—I don’t know, Adirondack couples, couples in Comfy Knit Corduroys and Barn Jackets and Boiled Wool Skimmers.” E.B. is looking dreamily at the clouds, as bright and big as ship sails, and nodding slowly. Far below us, the boats skimming along the water are no bigger than pellets of rice, the people as tiny as pepper grains. She is not at all aghast like she ought to be, so I ask her, “Have you ever seen an L.L. Bean catalogue?”

E.B. shakes her head and flicks the hem of her skirt so the crumbs bounce away. The skirt is too tight, like most of E.B.’s clothes—secondhand, bought from any of San Francisco’s innumerable resale stores. Her heels are off, revealing a hole in her stockings, her biggest toenail pointing out. “Mom mostly sewed our clothes growing up. We never ordered anything.”    

“Well, neither did we—I mean, they make good coats and sturdy luggage, but nobody orders L.L. Bean clothing, at least, nobody with any self-respect, and Harper and I only get the catalogue because I bought a briefcase—but anyway, Harper has her feet propped up on the table, and this catalogue propped up on the baby, and she just turns to me—”

“Where were you?”

“In the kitchen, I guess, making dinner—”

“What were you making?”

I turn to E.B., and she smears some more hummus on her fancy bread. I bet she made the bread, too.

“I don’t remember. Probably some kind of pasta, sauce out of a jar.” A pair of moms pushing strollers speed-walk by, their eyes hidden by their angled sunglasses. “Harper wasn’t picky yet.”

E.B. nods. “And then what?”

“And then—well, she arranges all these torn-out L.L. Bean models around her on the sofa, holds one up to me and asks, ‘Why don’t we look like this?’ And I say, ‘Like what? Like lumberjacks?’ And she says, ‘No. Serene.’”

E.B. nods again and tucks some stray hair behind her ear. Her hair is the color of wheat and makes me think of Iowa, heartlands and heartaches, even though her roots are showing, dark as dirt. I don’t know where E.B. grew up.

“And, at the time, I think I said, ‘Because I’m underpaid and you’re pregnant,’ trying to make a joke of it, but Harper wasn’t laughing.” I wonder if, like Harper, E.B. will tell me I tell my stories too long, that I never know when to stop and always drag the punch line down with commentary. “You’re not your own DVD, Michael,” she said to me once, feeling especially cranky in her stretchy-waisted pants. “Nobody cares about your Special Features.” I was just grateful she thought I still had any.

But E.B. doesn’t criticize, and I wonder how could she, remembering, again, that she’s the overweight temp receptionist with a head full of muddled aspirations and a body gone soft by the yield of her own hands. I wonder how could she, remembering, again, that we’re friends.

“Who asks for serenity these days?” she says. She produces a brick of carrot cake from her paper lunch bag. Unasked, she halves it on her thigh and hands me the greater half. I swap it for the smaller.

“Exactly,” I say.

“Though I always liked that word—no, wait. Serendipity. That was the one. Or maybe it was circumstantial.”

I shrug. I know E.B. doesn’t know what to tell me, but I also know she knows letting me talk is nearly always enough.

“Happenstance,” says E.B, trying out its texture, like thumbing a corner of chintz at a fabric store. “I should go back to writing poetry.” She tears off pieces of the carrot cake and tosses it to the sparrows congregating under a nearby tree. She sighs. “Well I, for one, am glad you don’t look like a lumberjack.”

“At least someone is,” I say. “I’ll be sure and tell Harper.”

E.B. glances at me—she is twenty-three, and the matrimonial world is as distant and weird to her as Antarctica, as it was to me before Harper and I married. “Please don’t,” she says.

“I’m teasing,” I say. “Don’t worry.”

“Thanks,” says E.B., and when we can’t eat any more cake, we feed what remains to the sparrows.

***

Harper Francis Henderson and I were married under a cypress on a coastal bluff at Moss Beach a year and a half ago. I grew up in Seattle but didn’t have the heart to tell Harper, raised in a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, that there was a thick chance that her designer wedding dress would look like a bedsheet in the inevitable fog. We squinted to read our vows. We held hands just to make sure the other one was there. Guests told me later that the ceremony was beautiful.

Harper was the first girlfriend who’d ever let me sleep with her. The others, few though they were, pushed my hands away or quietly asked to be taken home.  I fell for the “It’s because I like you” line half a dozen times—until I met Harper, who told me outright if they’d really liked me, they would’ve gone down on me. And then she went down on me, to drive the point home.  If Harper knew she was pioneering new territory with her tongue, she didn’t let on.

Harper, as it turned out, had only become the swan she was now barely before I’d met her. She grew up lanky, with no one to show her how to walk with all that leg, alongside the usual maladies of adolescence: braces, glasses, acne. She’d arrived at Berkeley bright-eyed and spread-eagle—her phrase, not mine. She said she was a quick learner, in and out of the classroom, and once on the grand piano in the performing arts hall. By the time I summoned the gall to ask her out, as hopeful and hopeless an act as scratching off a lottery ticket, she’d ascended the ranks of the sexually experienced and was flirting with gaining a reputation.

“I never thought you were a slut,” I said to her when she told me all this—maybe on our third date, maybe on our honeymoon. Her face had a way of muffling the words she said; you found yourself wondering how nature had compiled such perfect symmetry, what genes had intermingled to make such flawless features—the elf’s nose, the doll-wide eyes—and marveling at the simple fact that this face was looking right at you and expecting you to respond.

“I wasn’t a slut, porkchops,” she said. The word, dirty in any other plebeian’s mouth, was admirable, a sudden title when she said it. “The point is I was about to be.”

“And then you met me.”

“And then I met you.”

Harper tells the story of the way we met much more simply, of course. She leaves out all the sleeping with fraternity brothers, the blackout makeouts, the inebriated experimentation. She just says I was a cute boy who happened to be in line behind her at the bookstore who said hello, and, well, the rest is history.

Harper will tell the story of our child’s conception differently, too. She’ll make it a story, a tidy anecdote to tell other new parents, whenever we get around to meeting them. Right now there is no story—at least, none worth repeating. A lot of “But how”s and “Didn’t you”s and “I don’t know”s. A conclusive “I guess we’re having a baby.”

Though she’s been erupting out of her own frame for eight months now, the sight of Harper’s pregnant body still startles me when I open the door of our apartment. She’s bunched up on the sofa, all belly and little else. She used to tease that she felt like she was carrying a whole litter, but that stopped when the prospect of another baby, a stowaway, became too frightening to joke about. One was daunting enough.

“What took so long, porkchops?” she asks. “It’s half past six.”

“Really?” I say. I check my watch. “I went to the store and picked up a few things for dinner. I thought I’d make tacos—”

“Do we have any eggs? I want some yolky pokeys.”

“Some what?”

“You know—where you cut out the hole in the bread and put the egg in it.”

“Why don’t we just make eggs and toast? Breakfast for dinner?”

“It isn’t the same. In some places, it’s called toad-in-the-hole. And did you know—” She sits up, revealing the tangles and snarls of the back of her molasses-brown hair from a day spent curled on the couch. “Did you know that some toads are capable of living entombed in rock? Or concrete? They found 63 toads living inside a road in England one time. I saw it on TV today.”

Later, as she’s eating her eggs, Harper lifts up her shirt and reveals the target she’s painted on her stomach. “I did this today, too,” she says. “I thought later I’d stand at one end of the hall and you could stand at the other and throw darts at me.” She doesn’t smile, just observes her skin, the stretch marks wobbling up from her underwear and the knob of her belly button, as if it all belongs to someone else.

With her shirt bunched underneath her breasts, Harper pats her bulging stomach, then sets the empty plate on top. It balances perfectly.

“You know, sometimes I think I’d rather keep the shelf, and not have the baby at all,” she says, not looking at me, but looking very, very hard at the plate tottering on her bare skin. It finally slides off and clatters on the floor, and she sighs. “Those poor toads,” she says.

***

E.B. refuses to tell me what the initials in her name stand for. “I can’t,” she said when I first wheedled her about it, loitering at the lobby desk where she answers phones beneath the enormous enlargement of the Chronicle’s first front page. Civil War headlines rival the latest innovations in trolley transportation, and sour-faced men with handlebar moustaches pose grimly in grainy black-and-white. I work in the hive of cubicles down the hall, where I drop and drag newspaper articles for the San Francisco Chronicle all day long, spine hunched, fist planted firm at my chin, clicking and scrolling away.

When I asked her why she couldn’t tell me, she shrugged. “Because it’s a joke that isn’t funny,” she said. “That’s all there is to it.”

“You do know my wife’s name is Harper, right?” I’d said, consoling and cajoling both.

“Yes, but I’ve seen your wife,” she’d answered, keeping her gaze down, and I let it go at that.

It became a game; I’d drop candy-colored Post-its in E.B.’s incoming message box, trying to guess her actual name. I was on an Elizabeth bent when Harper got pregnant—Elizabeth Bianca, Elizabeth Brittany, Elizabeth Blair. E.B. called from the reception desk while I was laying out the Births and Marriages, overwhelmed by the sheer number of names, by the prospect of naming the conglomeration of cells in Harper’s abdomen that were currently making their way towards babyhood. I hadn’t entered the day’s attempt, and E.B. had called to chide me.

“Give up?” she said over the phone.

“On Elizabeth, yes,” I’d said. “Figured you’d go by Liz, anyway.”

I began thinking of diminutives, of the baby’s inevitable nicknaming—my own name had been easily botched over the years, Mikey the toddler and Mike the teenager, until I’d grown into all seven letters of Michael.

“Smart move,” E.B. had said. “You aren’t thinking hard enough, anyway.”

“If I find out you made your name up, just for kicks—”

“What’ll you do? Post it on the office bulletin board? Make an announcement? Buy a bullhorn? ‘Attention everyone—E.B. Norris is a fraud—her real name is Wendy?’”

“Is it Wendy?”

And in the silence that followed, we both hit the same realization, like two boats grounding on the shore at the same moment: this quippy conversation was textbook flirting, and that there was nothing good that could come of it. But we were too far sunk with no bail bucket, or at least I felt that way. So we ate our lunches together that day, as innocent as schoolchildren. And the next day we tried a new bench. I told Harper I’d made a new friend, mainly to talk about something other than the pregnancy, which was slowly consuming our apartment like a mold.

“You mean that dumpy girl that works the desk?” Harper said. We were nested on the couch, idly watching the weather report. Even at the precipice of disgust, Harper’s face was magnificent. “With the crooked teeth?”

“Are they crooked?” I thought about E.B.’s mouth. Harper scowled; it was stunning. “Yes, that’s the one. She’s invited us over for dinner. She’s taking night classes at the Culinary Academy, wants to make us fwagrass or something.”

“Foie gras,” said Harper. She took French at Berkeley, spent childhood summers at her grandparents’ on the Riviera, knew that Nice rhymed with cease, not ice, when I was still learning my colors. “I don’t know, porkchops,” she said. “That might not be good for the baby.”

“If anything, the baby will thank us for giving it such a developed palate.”

“Or it’ll be the pickiest eater in the world. And then it’d be miserable.” She prodded her stomach, looked down the neckline of her shirt. “How does it survive in there? In me?” And then she stretched until she was one line of woman along the couch, with her toes pointed and her shoulders back, her head in my lap. “Since when did I become a cage?”

***

“No,” I say to E.B. as we walk back to the Chronicle’s offices, fat with carrot cake and sushi. The sky is blue enough to smear, the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill chattering in the gardens that line the steep walk down. “I guess it was going weird before the catalogue showed up. The baby’s due in a month, and she still hasn’t settled on a name—I’ve been trying to help, you know, since I’m so into names—” I look to see if E.B. catches our little reference, but she’s staring at her feet, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk. “And Harper insists on calling the baby ‘it’—we don’t know the gender. She said she wanted a surprise—she’s afraid of her thinking affecting the baby too much—psychologically and all—the doctor says everything’s going fine, but Harper’s convinced that she’ll give it some prenatal complex. That we’ll have to go to baby shrinks.”

“Shrinks aren’t so bad,” says E.B. “They’re just paid ears, really, but sometimes that’s all you need. I got a lot sorted out when I was rambling on to some counselor.”

I laugh a little and slow my pace, knowing E.B. is scrambling to keep up. Harper only sees her as dumpy because she’s nearly a dozen inches shorter than me, petite, nearly pudgy, whereas Harper and I are both tall, and our progeny, swimming around in Harper and shaping its skeleton, will probably be tall, too. 

“So you don’t think I pay you enough?” I say. “For freelancing?”

E.B. blushes deep and pulls the conversation back to its beginnings. “So it’s been going weird for a while.”

I nod. “But at least it’s going someplace.”

“Sure,” says E.B. “If that’s what you want.”

***

E.B.’s words echo worse than the sirens careening along the streets as I lie in bed with Harper that night. She wears only her underthings to bed, leaving her legs bare, her swollen stomach exposed. The target she drew wouldn’t wash off, and I trace it idly as she sleeps, around and around. I think of names, Eloise and Emily and Estrella. They are mismatched socks in my mind, ill-fitting and disposable. I lay on my back and watch the beacons of passing headlights as they trace over our bedroom, a searchlight in the dark. I lace my hands over my navel; underneath, my hunger churns and protests, a void expanding since noon.

In the kitchen, our fridge is haphazardly stocked: pricey hand-shaved cheese on top of Oscar Mayer baloney; free-range eggs beside two unopened bottles of Tabasco; three varieties of cottage cheese; and a tub of weirdly-colored organic tomatoes, some as orange as grapefruits, others bruise purple. When Harper and I first moved to San Francisco, we prepared elaborate meals together, filling our little apartment with fragrant spices, cumin and clove and coriander, that lingered on our skin long after the dishes were stacked in the sink. She would calculate the time difference and call her mother in New York, scribbling French recipes on napkins. Now I arrange whatever bizarre amalgamation of cravings Harper is having on one plate: baby gherkin pickles with chicken fried rice, pineapple rings and French Onion potato chips. For dessert she’ll ask for gummi sharks—never bears.

I make myself a sandwich or bread soft enough to sleep on in our dark midnight kitchen and think about E.B.’s lunches. I wonder what her dinners are like, whether she has them alone, how her fridge must be brimming with Tupperwares full of exotic recipes. I imagine her taking her leftovers to the homeless shelter over in the Haight, spooning masalas and polentas onto cheap paper plates as the hippies and the hobos line up for seconds and thirds. We never did go have that fwagrass.

I think about Harper and how I always wanted to split dessert when we went out for dinner while we were dating, and how she’d refuse, politely, still cutting her salad into smaller and smaller flecks of lettuce. She told me once she was grateful that I’d never insisted. She said she’d dated other boys who said real women weren’t afraid to eat, and she had told them that their idea of real women probably had fake tits, too. They had not appreciated the irony. I’d never said an unkind word to Harper—I dropped compliments at her feet like rose petals, submerged her with affection, partially in a desperate attempt to keep her, a fragile, sugar-winged butterfly, in my net, but mainly because I simply did worship her that much. She spoke often of the slugs she used to date; beside them, I was downright gallant.

Back in bed, Harper rolls over.

“Where’d you go?” she murmurs.

“Just a sandwich, honey. Go back to sleep.”

She burrows further into the pillow, but I can see her eyes are open, the faint glint of the streetlight on the wet whites of her eyes.

“Michael,” she says. Her voice is small, and I can’t help but imagine the baby talking through her with its miniscule mouth, tugging on its umbilical cord. “Why’d you marry me?”

I put my hand on her face. “Because you’re beautiful and I love you, Harper. You know that.”  Her eyes close.

“I’m not beautiful,” she says. “Not anymore. Not with this house stuck inside of me.”

“Don’t be silly,” I say. “You’re stunning. You’re glowing.” She doesn’t answer, but I can’t quit remembering all those quiet meals we had before we married, the salads with the dressing on the side, the waters with the lemon wedge, the refused apple pie. “Harper,” I say. “Why did you marry me?”

“Mmm,” says Harper, a half-sigh, listening to what the baby wants her to say. “Because you asked me to.”

“What if I don’t like it?” Harper asks. She has the pregnancy test in her hand, tapping it against the kitchen table. Her eyes are red from crying, my palms are still damp with sweat. “What if it something’s wrong with it—one in a hundred thousand babies are born with no bones in their face, Michael, did you know? They look like monsters. What if it’s a monster, Michael? What then?”

“We could always—” I know she will not agree, and know I can’t either, because I can’t actually bring myself to say what I’m suggesting. “There are options, if you’re not ready—”

“I’m not ready? And what about you? Are you ready to have a baby with no bones in its face?” Harper paces around the table, her circuits tighter and tighter until I can see the ledge of the table digging into her hip.  “I already called my mother,” she finally admits. “She already knows. She’d never forgive me. I’d never forgive me. We have to keep it. We can’t not. Even if it is a monster, with no bones or no legs or no brain or no—where are you going?”

“I don’t know, Harper. Stop asking me.”



Published October 2009