*content warning: some readers may find a scene involving animals disturbing.
…
A funny thing to not have an opinion about a baby.
You.
I have no opinion of you.
You pull yourself up from the hallway tile, soft, cool fingers with paper-thin nails gripping the mail slot in the middle of the front door, knees bouncing to balance in a way others would find adorable or “to die for,” and I don’t know what to think of you. Are you smart for having figured out how to lift the brass flap to see outside, or would other babies have figured it out much earlier? Are you clever, or are you devious?
You’re already trying to find your way, assert your independence. I can only imagine the full life that awaits you, so I try not to.
Neighborhood children are fascinated by you, even if I’m not. They bring you to the mail slot by sticking in their fingers and waggling them at you, calling your name. They like to touch your hands when you raise them to theirs, and they blow on your fine hair. Your father has fine hair, too, and was surprised you had so much of your own when you were born. A week later he was leaving, another trip, and I waved your hand goodbye for you because you didn’t know goodbye, yet. These days, you wave on your own.
The cat can’t get enough of you. She hovers nearby when you play on the floor, her pregnant belly slow. Sometimes, you crawl to circle your arms around her and keep her close. I try to tell you that Chancey is fragile, but of course you don’t understand.
Tired of the mailbox, you crawl to me, your small hands disappearing in the shag. You pull yourself up to stand, using the couch for leverage, and slap at the magazine in my lap. It’s been some time since I’ve read, and I won’t have you spoiling this time of mine, so I move the magazine close and lean back into the couch.
The author writes that she is barren. A strange word for a womb. Dry and lifeless. I wonder how she feels as a barren woman, what images she conjures at the sound of the word. Surely she wants babies; women who don’t want children don’t refer to themselves as barren. But being barren affords her the opportunity to travel. She’s my age, twenty-two, and already she’s been to Libya, Japan, and forty-nine of fifty states. If she were the opposite of barren, like me, she would probably still be in Oklahoma where she was raised, feeding a family and dreaming of another life.
You tug at the cuff of my pants, and I wish I were Miss Graham from Oklahoma.
I pick you up, set you beside me, because maybe this will finally keep you still. I read aloud about Miss Graham’s adventures, and I imagine you at twenty, where you’ll be. You and this woman neither of us knows already have so much in common. She with her vestigial womb and you with your own limitless opportunities.
I wonder why you chose me.
“Why did you choose me?”
Your hand tugs at the corner of my magazine and your toes curl. I put a finger under your chin and raise your face. Your eyes look tired, I think, so I bring you to your room and put you to bed, then go back to the couch where I can travel with Miss Graham of Oklahoma to Peru, Mexico and Belize while, down the hall, you cry yourself to sleep.
It’s later, quite late, now, but the party across the street won’t end for hours. I get up and stand at the easel by the window and choose a pencil. I draw a vertical line, then a horizontal. Often, I don’t know what I’m drawing until it’s finished. A straight line once turned into an exercise in light and shadow. Another day, my lines became the smile of the Mona Lisa. All lines have their destinies, one by one bending and arching, meeting, until they become something they must have known they would be, whether or not I do. But somehow, I must, mustn’t I? All my choices, all my lines, have created this woman in the kitchen behind the window, cat at her feet, pencil in hand, husband asleep in the bedroom after a dinner of boxed macaroni and cheese and a pre-patted lamb patty because it was easy and she hates to cook. But she can learn to like to cook, if she so chooses.
I drop the pencil and pick up the cat.
“Sweet little pregnant Chancey. Did you choose this?” I rub her belly. We sit at the kitchen table and look out the window. She’s far along and I feel movement inside. What must it be like to have six, seven of them, all kicking at once? I wonder how she feels about motherhood, if she feels anything at all. If, as nature seems to dictate, Chancey’s pregnancy is nothing more than thoughtless instinct, having kittens might be as eventful as using the litterbox. What do people really know about cats? I don’t know that she’s not dying inside, pleading for mercy, screaming that she’s not prepared for this.
She squirms in my lap and climbs down to lick her stomach. A light goes on down the hall; Dean’s using the bathroom. When he finishes, he stops on his way to the bedroom.
“Still up?”
I tell him yes, but that I’ll be in, in a bit.
“Were you on the phone?”
“No.”
“I heard talking,” he says.
“Just me and the cat.”
He returns to the bedroom and closes the door.
I look across at the party and imagine glasses clinking and bouquets of laughter, hors d’oeuvres and candlelight. New friendships being made behind the curtains, flirtations building from passing glances, bonds among the people I used to talk to growing stronger. Michael is there. He works with a woman married to a man who works with Dean. I might have divorced Dean and lived with Michael, if I’d had the choice, if it hadn’t been too late, if I hadn’t found out I was more than a month pregnant. And then, after a few months, I might have left Michael and traveled to Bali and then met up with Miss Graham from Oklahoma in Tahiti, where we would sit on the beach and watch the pelicans fly over our heads. A little drunk from margaritas, I would accidentally call them penguins and we would laugh together and plan a trip to the North Pole.
The beads in the reflection look like rain, and I wonder if Tahiti even has pelicans.
Chancey’s new kittens tumble in the shag. You’re better at crawling than you were just a few weeks ago. You can follow a kitten for a while feet before it outruns you, but you don’t mind when it does because another invariably stumbles into your reach and you grab its tail and squeal and pull it to you. Dean had to take one to vet because you held it so tight, your tiny arms owning it so fiercely, that you hurt its leg.
You don’t pay Chancey much attention, anymore. She sits on the ottoman when she has a moment to herself; otherwise, she’s feeding and cleaning, dutifully licking heads and behinds until a floating hair or imaginary dust ball claims the attention of whichever member of her brood she’s grooming.
We sit together often, Chancey and I, while you and the kittens play. She rests her head in my lap and licks easily at her paws, extending her cleaning to my own hand. Sometimes, when you see this, you crawl over and slap the couch to send her away if the kittens are sleeping. But they’re awake, now, and no bigger than my hand, which makes them the perfect size for you. You reach out to grab the smallest one, the one Dean has named Tessie for Infinitesimal, but it escapes you and claws its way up the couch. Chancey sniffs her, jumps off the couch, and retreats into the closet. I think about bringing a pillow in there to join her.
“Don’t you feel her?” Dean stands in the doorway, on his way out.
“Who?”
I look down. You’re pulling at my pants, trying to climb my leg.
Dean stomps over and picks you up and plops you in my lap. “What do you mean, ‘who’?” He fixes his sleeve, which has pushed up and left his wrist bare.
“I knew she was there. I was going to pick her up.”
“When?”
“In a minute.”
“I have to go,” he says, looking at me in that way I’ve grown so used to.
You wave goodbye to him at the window, and after his car disappears I set you down. I don’t ask you, anymore, why you chose me. I don’t know that I care, because here you are. What I think about now is where choice lies. It scares me to think that it belongs to you, to Chancey’s kittens, to those in a realm I’m not familiar with. That I didn’t take pains to keep you away doesn’t comfort me; I did nothing to beckon you. Of that I’m certain. Still, I try to believe I really can have choices. I have to.
Chancey sticks her head out of the closet, then slips it back in when one of her kittens walks near. It stops, looks at the open door, then turns around and pounces on the closest sibling. There are six, in all. Too many to keep, and I don’t know enough people I trust who would take them. I go to the closet and bend down to pet Chancey.
We keep the garbage bags under the kitchen sink. I pull one out of the box and bring it to the living room.
The kittens aren’t hard to pull together. I trail my finger on the carpet, and they come running quickly enough, trying to catch and tackle my hand. Their small bodies cling to my palm, pink mouths biting and licking, as I set them one by one in the bag, closing it after each one so they don’t get out. When I have them all, I wring the opening and secure it with a twist-tie. I take the bag outside, set it near the curb, and go back into the house.
You sit in the middle of the floor, looking for the kitties. I call Chancey. She comes out of the closet and walks over to me, rubs her body along my ankle. Your head bobs to look at me, and I pick you up and bring you to the window. I don’t want to look at the bag; paws push at the plastic and I’m reminded of cartoons you watch, Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck in a scuffle after Bugs has trapped them in a laundry sack.
I am surprised to see Dean’s car pull up in front of the house. His wallet. I saw it on the kitchen counter. He gets out of the car and passes the bag, stops, and walks back to it. He unties the top and peers inside. I move away from the window, bring you to the couch and sit down. When he opens the door, sack in hand, and stares at me, I kiss your forehead.
“What the hell is this?” he says. He sets the bag down gently and begins pulling the kittens out, one by one. The first two are already dead, their fur bloodied, but just a little.
“It was better for them,” I say. “Chancey wasn’t paying attention.”
“So you killed them? You stuck them in a plastic bag and killed them?”
He pulls out the fourth, the fifth. The fourth is fine. The fifth looks drowsy. Dean pets it gently on the head, strokes its back and tail.
He tells me he doesn’t even know who I am.
“Iris!” I shout, because sometimes that’s the only way to make him hear me. “I’m goddamned Iris! Why couldn’t you just leave them out there? Why couldn’t you just leave them?”
He ignores me. He makes sure the sack is empty, then sets the dead kittens inside. He gets the food out from under the sink and fills their bowls, gives them fresh water, and takes the most sluggish of them and places them close to the food. I play with your fists and you smile, but I’m not in the mood for smiles. Dean stuffs his wallet in his back pocket.
“Are they still going to be alive when I get home?” He stands near the door, staring at me.
I don’t answer.
“Iris. Are they going to—”
“Yes! Yes, they’ll be alive. They’ll be fine, Dean. We’ll all be just fine.”
He slams the door behind him, and I bring you to the window to watch him leave. You wave goodbye.
When his car is gone, I smooth your hair and kiss your cheek. Your hand reaches up to tug my hair and I don’t tell you no, but let you pull it until my nose is brought down to your face. I place one of my palms against yours. So small, you are. You won’t remember me well enough to miss me.
*Fiction. Originally published in Regarding Arts and Letters. Edited here for length. I hope you enjoyed, or maybe appreciated, the story. It was written at a time when the baby pressure was high and it was easy to imagine being this woman in this life. Even when you know you don’t want something, if enough voices and whispers have communicated to you over many years that you’re supposed to want it, there’s a lot of mulling. Lots and lots of mulling. And, apparently, writing!
Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for not-fiction coming soon. - Kris
I would have appreciated a warning tag of some kind for animal harm... :(
A brilliant piece, I was completely drawn in! Thank you