I look over my shoulder at the beach at night—sand bleached white by the light of the moon, foamy waves silently washing ashore, a hollow sound from the wind all over, like the echo of a conch shell held against the ear. The roar in my head is all from pain. All day, the baby has been kicking and kicking, and now I know that the heaviness I felt earlier, the disquiet, must be labor. It’s almost a full month early—labor coupled with danger. I keep my hands away from my stomach, as if it might quiet itself. Sven opens a bottle of club soda and it gushes into the tall glass pitcher that sits on the table between his chair and Barbara’s. He begins to unscrew the cork in a bottle of white wine. Inside me, once, making my stomach pulse, the baby turns over. I concentrate, desperately, on the first thing I see. I focus on Sven’s fingers and count them, as though my baby were born and now I have to look for perfection. There is every possibility that my baby will be loved and cared for and will grow up to be like any of these people. Another contraction, and I reach out for Oliver’s hand but stop in time and stroke it, don’t squeeze.
I am really at some out-of-the-way beach house, with a man I am not married to and people I do not love, in labor.
Sven squeezes a lemon into the pitcher. Smoky drops fall into the soda and wine. I smile, the first to hold out my glass. Pain is relative.
Like Glass
In the picture, only the man is looking at the camera. The baby in the chair, out on the lawn, is looking in another direction, not at his father. His father has a grip on a collie—trying, no doubt, to make the dog turn its head toward the lens. The dog looks away, no space separating its snout from the white border. I wonder why, in those days, photographs had borders that looked as if they had been cut with pinking shears.
The collie is dead. The man with a pompadour of curly brown hair and with large, sloping shoulders was alive, the last time I heard. The baby grew up and became my husband and now is no longer married to me. I am trying to follow his line of vision in the picture. Obviously, he’d had enough of paying attention to his father or to the dog that day. It is a picture of a baby gazing into the distance.
I have a lot of distinct memories of things that happened while I was married, but lately I’ve been thinking about two things that are similar, although they have nothing in common. We lived on the top floor of a brownstone. When we decided to separate and I moved out, Paul changed the lock on the door. When I came back to take my things, there was no way to get them. I went away and thought about it until I didn’t feel angry anymore. By then it was winter, and cold leaked in my windows. I had my daughter, and other things, to think about. In the cold, though, walking around the apartment in a sweater most people would have thought thick enough to wear outside, or huddling on the sofa under an old red-and-brown afghan, I would start feeling romantic about my husband.
One afternoon—it was February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day—I had a couple of drinks and put on my long green coat with a huge hood that made me look like a monk and went to the window and saw that the snow had melted on the sidewalk: I could get away with wearing my comfortable rubber-soled sandals with thick wool socks. So I went out and stopped at Sheridan Square to buy
