The Entire Predicament (11 page)

She has drawn me a map. It’s a terrific-looking map, drawn on fibrous paper with a felt-tip pen that bled a lot. It looks like a treasure map, and I appreciate the map.

If I go I could go because I appreciate the map as I might appreciate being given a business that makes money. If I go I could go because she’s not dead yet and I’m a nice person, and I think I might be her favorite. If I go I could go because something might happen. Something will happen anyway, but if I go something will also happen, but different.

One time, at a dinner party roundtable, one of my nice adult friends asked me what I thought. She remembered from the other dinner party roundtable that someone had buried that baby in my life. I remembered why I tried not to mention it. I thought, Oh shit, I forgot, and I mentioned it. So all of a sudden I wondered what I thought, because she asked, and I noticed I’d thought, overall, really, not much. I went through a period of time thinking, back when I was thirteen, the age of the girls.When I turned thirteen, I thought, I’m going through a gate, because I am now the age those girls were, and remain to me.The baby that had been flopping in my life since I was born had, at that point, only just appeared in theirs, years and years before.

I looked around the dinner party roundtable. There were my friends, these grown-up girls, four of them. One of them I’d been in love with for a long time without mentioning it. Another I liked well enough and had sex with when we were both lonely and giddy at the same time. Another I thought was the smartest person I’d ever met who felt like hanging out with me. Another was a great cook and hobbyist.

We are all adults. I do not want them to look at me and think of a flopping baby. I do not want them to look at me and suddenly remember that they weren’t thinking of a baby flopping around in my past. I hope it surprised those girls
later that they didn’t think much about the baby, once it was buried again. Every so often, the noisier girl says to the quieter girl, Remember that baby? And the quieter girl says, Yeah. I hope they don’t picture themselves sparring with a Salome in a school yard. I hope they don’t think a couple girls can’t run around in a field in the rain.

I don’t know if I like Stacy. I find myself afraid that at some point, after they were cleared of suspicion, Stacy called the girls on the telephone and asked them for details so she could follow up. I don’t know if there is anything to like about Stacy, unless you agree with her about justice, which I don’t. In fact, I think agreeing with Stacy about justice is a bit of grabbing for straws. You could like grabbing for straws. I think Stacy must like grabbing for straws, and just keeps getting short ones. I think I would prefer a roll in the hay but the whole thing makes me giddy. Perhaps what you can’t resist is all right. I like Stacy all right.

Where is the husband now, where are the girls grown, where was the baby when Aunt Stacy was unhooking the swing in the wind and nursing her ankle?

The husband was out West, visiting family, when the baby was found. He flew back with the rest of them, but he wouldn’t go into the house. He stayed in a motel for a while. He and Stacy had a big fight about it. She wanted him to go back into the house, but he didn’t want to go into the house. He said, “Stacy, you cannot make me go into that house.” He said it was his baby, too. He bought a house out West and went there.

After the girls found the baby, they knelt with it on the noisy girl’s threshold with the door open, to let out the light, and looked at its nose and mouth. One time, a policeman asked one girl in one room, and then the other girl in another room, why they didn’t bring the baby inside immediately.The noisy girl said, “You don’t know.You weren’t there.”The quiet girl said, “We were afraid to bring it into the house.”What she meant was they brought the baby out of the rain and into the light, and there was enough light on the porch so they could see, and it didn’t matter whether they were inside or outside the house, that the boundaries he was asking about were arbitrary and you don’t think about, for God’s sake,
architecture
at a time like that. But the policeman thought maybe something was scary about the noisy girl’s parents, so he investigated them to find out about possible abuse.

I went to Aunt Stacy’s house with the map she’d sent me. I sat on the sofa next to the blue wingback chair. I held the map in my hand, and Stacy held my hand with the map in it and pointed to the map with her other hand. She said, Please go there, then there, then there. Call me from there, if they have a phone. She’s unhooking the swing. She’s nursing her ankle. When she looks at me, I’m burying the baby. When she looks at me, I’m the baby, buried.

I went back to my house, which was a good long drive.You never know how it feels until it happens to you, and then if it happens to you, you still have no idea if you know how it felt to anyone else. At that point, you’re pretty busy anyway. And later, you don’t remember so well.You feel what you are feeling now. I don’t know what it is.

When I got home, I opened the back door, which divides my kitchen from the path that leads to the woods. I set about washing some dishes. I got partway through, and then I took a bath. I’ve got a lousy, shallow tub, and while I was soaking, I thought about how a bathtub ought to be designed. It ought to be adjustable like a lawn chair, or big enough to have a lawn chair in it. It ought to have a faucet you can operate easily with your foot. It ought not to be shaped like a trough. I’d stopped washing my dishes because a moth flew out of my cupboard and it turns out moths were making babies in my beans. I dumped the beans in the trash can outside, and then I got into the tub.When I got out of the tub, I stood in my kitchen in my bathrobe and watched a bird that had flown in. Usually, earlier in the season perhaps, when a bird comes in it flaps around in a panic, and usually ends up really hurting itself. But with this bird, I had the sense it was attempting to migrate, that my house was simply, for the moment, in the way of the South, because it flew in, perched on a shelf, a plant, the dish rack, and then flew out, decent and calm as a bird can be. There was no drama, no righteous desperation.

I’m stuck at thirteen only when I think of the baby, and when I think of the baby, I’m stuck at thirteen. It’s not right, because there’s a lot more to me, I’m sure. In any case, the suspense is killing me.

Go to the mountain.There’s a sagging cabin with its mortar falling out in chunks. In it live some people.They’re up on the mountain, making a living. Ask at the door, Did you make a call from a pay phone on this date? Do you remember a man wearing yellow boots? Were you eating coleslaw at the diner?
Did you tell this woman you were in a hurry? Do you or did you ever own a parakeet? Did this tumble from your pocket? Did you break this omelet pan? Have you traveled to Ecuador? And what about your family? And what about your friends? Have you buried a baby?

Did you bury this baby?

I dried my hair and then I crawled under my fluffy covers. Under the covers there is heat and air. As I was falling asleep, one of my friends called, and it could have been any one of them, they are all so fine and lovely. I spoke with her on the phone, bringing the phone with me under the covers. I told her about the bird in my kitchen, and then about this one time in junior high when we did a Christmas show at a nursing home. We made reindeer horns out of coat hangers and our fathers’ socks. We sang and gave out peppermints. We used the peppermints as the reason to go up to the old people and say, “Merry Christmas, how’d you like the show?”

I thought, Who told us to do that? Who said give peppermints to people with dentures? Who said do role reversal on the candy dish on gramma’s coffee table? Who said bad singing is good singing if it’s volunteer? I gave a peppermint to a woman who held an aluminum mixing bowl in her lap and spat great translucent globes of mucus that fell, like action heroes, in slow motion. I said, “Merry Christmas, how’d you like the show?” and she said, “It was stupid,” and I regret with might the indignation I felt, and how such simplicity stumped me.

Under the covers, we talked for hours, and I didn’t have to tell her how the thing I meant about the peppermints was I think you lose more if you lose so much you start living
for convention. Instead, I told her all sorts of things, dumb little things that happened one time, and dumb little things I was thinking about now and then. We swapped off. I told her something and then she told me something back. We were on the phone for enough time that I got unsleepy and then sleepy again several times. She said, “I’m so sleepy,” and I said, “But now I’m awake,” and I said, “I’m so sleepy,” and she said, “But now I’m awake.” Finally, we were both sleepy at the same moment, and I hardly remember most of what we talked about, which is much of why it felt so lovely. There was some justice, I thought, later. A sweet, naked little bully, with scarves around her feet.

Started off I felt afraid of any electric cord. Could get disrupted, go back to twelve, never wake me. I could sleep and sleep, miss work, seem dead. So it was batteries, little fold-out clocks I liked. I got one and it took the place of a watch. I carried it around and it felt at once antiquated and unpretentious, a pocketwatch but practical, digital, black and plastic. Not masculine (chunky, leather) or feminine (slender, jeweled) and somehow, in my pocket, anti-time.

Countless people have solved their problems with clocks.

But I crushed mine, sitting on it too much. The numbers flickered and faded, washed into the pale khaki of dead electronic screen space. Meant I had to go shopping, a terrible, terrible thing. I rejected a flip-bottom silver-colored plastic one because its imitation alloy finish was so deadly cheap and lightweight, and then I rejected a simple black version with
hands because the numbers glowed green and I couldn’t bear the resemblance to the Halloween masks on sale next to it, and now, after several stores and two returned purchases I have this round one, actual metal, with hands and a tiny white bulb that lights the face when I press a button in the back, and it slides in and out of a clever case.

It’s the ticks, though. I stay awake. I write this in my notebook leaning over my night table in the tiny bulb glow, angry at the weakness of the entire situation.

Here, in this imaginary epistolary, I’m ticking, too.

At night, one night, I couldn’t reach you. You were visiting your parents.Their phone rang and rang but no one answered and no machine. I didn’t know the arrangement your family has with the computer. I hung up and I lay there, butt to butt with my dog, imagining the terrible things you could be going through, ranging from they took you to dinner and a movie to they bound you in a chair and asked you who the hell I was and why I kept calling.

It’s blue, with small blue roses on one side and words on the other.

I’m holding it.

It says: “This product has been engineered to put out the maximum temperature allowed by industry standards. Heating pad.Wetproof E12107. Danger.” It doesn’t have periods, commas,
or semicolons, but I add them as I read and so I add them here, desperate for punctuation. “Burns will result from improper use,” it says. “To reduce the risk of burns, electric shock, and fire, this product must be used with the following instructions: do not use while sleeping; burns can occur before timer turns off; burns may occur regardless of timer or control setting; check skin under pad frequently to avoid burning and blistering; do not use on infant; this pad is not to be used by or on an invalid, a sleeping or unconscious person, a person with poor blood circulation, a paralyzed person or a person with diabetes; do not use if signs of appendicitis are present; do not use a heating pad on areas of sensitive skin; never use pad without removable cover in place; do not use in an oxygen enriched environment or near equipment that stores or emits oxygen; place pad on top of and not under the part of the body needing heat; do not sit on, or against, or crush pad; avoid sharp folds; never pull this pad by the supply cord and do not use the cord as a handle; unplug when not in use; never use pins or other metallic means to fasten this pad in place; carefully examine inner cover before each use; discard the pad if inner covering shows any signs of deterioration such as blistering or cracking; read and follow all instructions on box or packed with pad before using. Fabric content 100% polyester.”