If You're Not Yet Like Me (6 page)

I’m sure, Baby, you’ve done the math. Zachary isn’t your father.

“But, Joellyn—!” you want to cry out. Can’t say I blame you.

I thought about sending the pregnancy test to my mother, with that same note: “I’m screwed!!!” I was screwed. By Dickens. Thus, you. Instead, I threw the test and its box away, and I said, “Well, here we are.” You were listening, I knew. I couldn’t just get rid of you.

I
n a few weeks, you will turn from fetus to baby, and you will have a baby mind to match your baby babble, your toothless crying. You’ll find me with your baby mouth. And when that mouth does learn to speak, you won’t call me Joellyn.

For now, all I can do is instruct. People talk to the dead, so why not to the unborn? Be careful, I want to say. I’m sorry, I want to say. Things will turn out differently for you.

Let this be a final story, then, from your dear Joellyn. I’m telling it to soften the blow of revelation. Maybe, by some miracle, you’ll be born knowing all of this, and you won’t come to me later, and ask for the truth. Who knows what I’ll tell you when you’re older. This could be the confession before the deception.

N
owadays, my stomach is round, stretched taut as a drum. Small blue veins map the blood I pump to you. I have to pee eight times an hour. I barely sleep. My labia feels fat. I suppose the gift of my new full breasts must be offset somehow.

Yesterday, my parents came over to clear out my kitchen so that the exterminators can get rid of my roach problem. All dishes and food must be removed, and the counters must be draped with newspaper. There is still that one empty cupboard, which I cleaned out months ago, for the future.

My mother says my bedroom is large enough for the crib she bought, thank goodness. We agree I can shine this on—my one-bedroom, freelance situation—for a year or two. “And then you’ll have to do something,” she said. She asked again who the father was.

I auditioned answers. I could have said, “You don’t want to know.” Or, “The father was a dick.” I closed my eyes, as if that might help.

“The father—” I imagined saying, “he’s invisible.”

I pressed my eyelids and saw the universe. I heard the cars passing on the street outside. The clock on the kitchen wall counted off the seconds.

My mother repeated her question.

I opened my eyes.

I AM THE
LION
NOW

M
argaret took a bath. The tub, like all tubs in apartments worth living in, was grimy. She had scrubbed it many times but the porcelain remained gray and streaked with rust around the drain. She didn’t mind. She also kissed dogs on the mouth, didn’t wash her fruit. Let the squeamish suffer their fear, let them live without really living. Margaret was safe in her risk-taking.

In the kitchen, Toby baked a cake, his second: the first one had burned. Margaret had assumed he’d forgotten to turn on the timer, but this was deliberate. He’d wanted to have sex, more than he wanted to eat cake, and he knew that if the timer went off in the middle, they would stop to handle it. They were married, and passion was not greater than cake. But they didn’t end up having sex (because there were dishes to wash, because they were tired—they were always tired now that the baby was on the way), and the cake burned anyway. Toby felt silly, and a little disappointed by his carelessness.

The average married couple in Los Angeles has sex once a week. The number increases among newlyweds, and decreases considerably among those with children. Margaret and Toby, married four years, together for six, were not doing badly. Margaret kept a tally of their lovemaking in her checkbook. Toby wasn’t aware of the tally, wasn’t aware that their average was higher than the norm during the fall and lower in the summer, bikini wax or not. Heat wasn’t sexy. Margaret sometimes imagined a future biographer, their biographer, celebrating the discovery of this diligent record. She didn’t realize that no one was recording the more important matters. Toby’s baking, for instance. That he was making a second cake two hours after the first, simply because his wife had a craving.

In the bathroom, a candle next to the sink glowed weakly, a gesture of light. Margaret lay in the tub with her eyes closed; the book she had brought into the room admonished nearby. It was a turgid novel, too challenging to read in water. Margaret longed for a tabloid—all those pregnant actresses. But I am worth it, whispered the book.

Because the smell of burnt food lingers, Toby had opened the front door and all the windows. As he’d begun to stir the second batch of dry ingredients, Margaret had said, “I feel fat. I’m going to take a bath.”

“You’re not fat,” Toby said. “You’re pregnant.”

“My arms aren’t,” she said.

Margaret was three and a half months along; she’d recently purchased a maternity wardrobe, even though she didn’t need it quite yet. Toby found the smock dresses, and the shirts like parachutes, sexy.

For some reason, taking a bath temporarily cleansed his wife of any physical self-loathing. In water she was weightless, and afterwards, she put on the same extra-large t-shirt, its size dwarfing her, making her feel thin. The baby inside her, (a boy, though neither Toby nor Margaret knew this yet, or wanted to), liked the sound of the running faucet, and the shaking and groan of the pipes. He heard everything, and tucked the information like loose change into his forming brain.

T
he sound was like a handful of paperclips scattering across the hardwood floor. A scampering. From the kitchen Toby yelled, “Holy fucking shit!”

Margaret stood up, feet in bath water. “What was that?” she called, her ear toward the door. She heard the rustling of paper bags—the two next to the garbage, used for recycling. “Are you okay?” she yelled. The baby moved, but he was too small for Margaret to notice.

“There’s a fucking rat in here!” Toby cried. Boyish cowardice tugged at the edge of his voice. Margaret heard a kitchen chair slide across the floor and she imagined Toby standing on it.

She grabbed her towel from the rack, pulling it so strongly that it hit the candle, tipping it over, onto the book. The book caught fire.

“Fire!” she yelled.

“Possum!” Toby yelled. He hadn’t heard his wife in the bathroom.

The possum, a baby, ran back and forth across the kitchen, butting its head against the cabinets and the fridge. It did look like a rat, but an obese one, pink-eyed, with that same root-vegetable tail.

The book’s pages went first, curling black with the lick of fire, then disintegrating. The covers were hardbound, and thus more stubborn, but it didn’t take long for the flames to cover the entire book, eating it. The room turned orange with the glow, and Margaret thought first of that Ray Bradbury novel, then of the Nazis, then of death, then of the first cake, which had also burned, then of the baby, oh not my baby, then of death again.

As the possum ran for the living room, Toby realized what had happened. Abandoned by its mother, the animal needed food, and the burnt cake smell had been inviting. A coyote might be next in the hunger parade, might come skulking through the front door, which was still open.

The possum ran behind the couch. Food, food, food!

Margaret plunged her towel into the tub of water, and, once soaked through, flung it over the flames, suffocating them. The book stopped burning. Where was Toby?

“Fire!” she yelled again, testing him.

Toby smelled the fire just as he heard Margaret’s call. Burnt book wasn’t the same as burnt cake. At seven years old, he and his brothers had thrown a lit match to a pile of their mother’s collection of romance novels. The flames leapt from the paperbacks to a nearby bush, swallowing it with a roar of heat. Later, when the firefighters were leaving, one of them said to him, “Be careful there, Moses,” and Toby had nodded, confused. Who was this Moses?

Toby wasn’t thinking of this as he ran for the bathroom—only of his actions: the jumping off of the chair, the pushing in of the bathroom door, the reaching out for Margaret, who was naked and dousing something charred in the sink. The breathlessness of, “Are you all right, babe? What happened?”

Margaret laughed. “Oops,” she said. “Guess I won’t be reading this.” All crises, once averted, become jokes.

“Did you burn yourself?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.”

Toby kissed his wife on the mouth and on the belly. “There’s a small beast in the living room.”

The timer shrilled. Cake.

“Come quick,” Toby said, already out of the bathroom. “I might contract rabies.”

T
oby pulled the cake out of the oven before attending to the possum, whom he could hear rustling behind the couch, scratching at the walls. If the possum couldn’t behave like a human being, why not run outside, where it belonged?

Dig, dig, dig, said the possum. It came out as a snort.

Margaret thought she heard a suppressed roar coming from the kitchen. Before the turgid novel, she’d been reading a book about the history of Al-Qaeda; in it, the author told about Taliban members who had broken into an Afghani zoo. One man decreed the bear’s “beard” too short and cut off the animal’s nose; another zealot leapt into the lion’s den yelling, “I am the lion now!” The lion killed him. The noseless bear survived.

When Margaret had first read that passage, she’d been appalled. Those kinds of men had to be contained. The longer she spent away from the book, though, the more the lesson changed. Now she thought the story meant something else entirely. Such as: Do not underestimate the strength of animals.

When Margaret was a girl, her father called her mother Mama Bear, as in, Go ask Mama Bear what’s for dinner, or, Mama Bear’s going to tuck you in tonight. Her mother was cornstalk-thin, though, not like a bear at all, and Margaret never followed her father’s lead.

With oven mitts on his hands, Toby knelt on the floor. “Come here, little possum,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The possum crouched next to the couch, a few inches from the wall. He sat on his hind legs like the smallest squirrel, his pink nose twitching. The white of his face was heart-shaped.

“Where’s your mommy?” Toby asked.

He meant to swipe at the animal, to push it closer to the open door, but the possum only sniffed the oven mitt. Smell, smell, smell!

“Hey, Buddy,” Toby whispered, something in his chest opening.

The possum opened its mouth briefly, as if to yawn, or smile. Its tongue was the same shade of pink as its nose. It did not run, nor did it play dead like other possums when afraid. This possum had only been separated from its mother for an hour or so, but it had already forgotten all the ways of its species. It wasn’t afraid.

Toby leaned forward and picked up the animal, who rolled into a ball in the palm of the oven mitt. “Hi, baby.”

The possum was two months old. When it was born—hairless, blind, without legs—it was the size of a sugar cube.

“Hello, hello,” Toby whispered. “Do you need help?”

The possum emitted a soft sleepy growl.

M
argaret walked into the kitchen wearing her x-large t-shirt, her hair combed and twisted into a bun. She didn’t want to be chasing a wild animal—a beast with rabies, perhaps—in nothing but a towel and a mess of dripping hair. If the animal urinated or spit on the floor, how would they distinguish it from the bathwater?

She grabbed the broom from the pantry. She would sweep the animal out the front door like so much dust.

“Ready?” she said.

But Toby had already swaddled the possum in a dish towel and now cradled the animal in his arms. The oven mitts waited on the counter, next to the two cakes: the edible and the burnt.

“What are you doing?” Margaret said, opening her hands. The broom fell like a guillotine blade onto the floor, and the sound made the possum tremble.

Toby hushed the animal. “He’s so sweet and docile.”

Margaret shook her head. “The human stain, Toby.” She leaned into her husband, peering at the animal before drawing back. “You’ve marked him,” she said. “Now he’ll be shunned by the animal kingdom.”

“Listen to you,” Toby said, bouncing the possum a little. “The animal kingdom? You sound like a PBS special.” Toby drew his lips down in a pout: a sad clown. “He’s fine, Mar. Aren’t you, little buddy?”

“No,” Margaret said. “He belongs in nature, not in here.”

“There was just a fire in the bathroom,” Toby said. “There are no boundaries.”

“What are you talking about, no boundaries? “

The possum burrowed into the dish towel. Warmth!

“Really,” Margaret said. “We have to get it out of here.”

Toby felt anger fizzing up in him. Sometimes his wife could be so cold. They often joked that once the baby was born, Toby would be the one to comfort it with a lullaby in the middle of the night. Margaret would handle the diapering and the discipline, the driving lessons. What she lacked in tenderness, he knew, she made up for with efficiency. He had accepted her flaws long ago, ever since their second date, when he realized he loved her, right after she’d insisted that he split the chef’s salad with her, two plates please, even though he didn’t feel like a salad.

“Let’s see how it goes,” Toby said. “Maybe we can keep him, like a pet?” Even as he said it, he knew how stupid it sounded. But he kept going because there was something, a living creature, at stake. “He’s not like a skunk—you know, that stinks unless you take out that stink organ. Can’t a possum be trained, like a dog?”

Toby did have a point. Margaret’s grandparents had managed to domesticate a wolf on their farm in upstate New York. They’d found it as a cub, and her grandfather had taught it to howl at the moon. And, in the larger scheme of things, a possum was not a dangerous animal—maybe a little mean, but not dangerous.

Toby and Margaret were not aware that just a few blocks west, in Little Armenia, a man kept a jaguar caged in his studio apartment. He fed it raw chicken. Or that dogs who had never lived among people did not care for people, and that they ate anything to survive, from cockroaches to half-alive pigeons.

Margaret imagined walking a leashed possum down the street, or perhaps transporting it in a designer tote. She imagined cuddling with it, washing it in the bathtub. She could do this. Wasn’t caring for animals the precursor to caring for babies?

But then she remembered the red eyes, and their eerie chortling mating sound. The possum could bite her baby, eat him. She could not underestimate its strength, its animal-ness.

“You can keep it for one night,” Margaret said. “And then we’ll let it go, or call someone.”

Toby, surprised, nodded. “We have to find out what it eats.” He grinned. “I’m putting it in the cradle.”

“This is so bad,” Margaret said. She reached out and touched her husband’s cheek. “You’re so bad.”

“Let’s have sex,” Toby said.

T
he possum, half-asleep in a sleeve of Toby’s sweatshirt, lay in the cradle, which Toby’s mother had purchased online five minutes after she received the news that she would be a grandmother. The cradle now waited solemnly next to the bed, occasionally nudging in the breeze that drifted through the nearby window.

Margaret and Toby rolled across the bed, naked. Toby wanted to be gentle with his wife, who had already begun to feel different in his arms—a little swollen. But Margaret didn’t feel any different, or she felt different, but certainly not fragile, as Toby’s whispery grasp suggested, and she wanted to prove this to him. She grabbed his waist and thought, I am the lion now.

From afar they might’ve resembled college wrestlers, negotiating each other’s bodies with warring agility. Except they kept whispering, “I love you,” and kissing. Both were thinking about the possum, but neither mentioned it. It was like their future baby, in the room, but not. There was something sexy about this.

From the cradle, the possum breathed easily. The figures on the bed could’ve been clouds passing overhead.

A
fterwards, Toby carried the possum to the living room while Margaret scavenged for food for it in the kitchen. There were some raspberries in the fridge, their edges furry with mold. Worrying that the possum wouldn’t take to these, Margaret also grabbed the milk, and the turkey baster. She left the cakes for fear that the sugar content, and the chocolate, would be deadly.

Toby rocked the possum back and forth as it batted at his chest. He already loved this animal, but he didn’t say it out loud.

Margaret screamed when she entered the room. Just behind the screen door watched a possum the size of an overweight cat, with long, guitar-string whiskers and a deranged grimace. Atop its back, her back, Margaret now realized, hung three babies. Siblings.