Back in the olden days,girls, do you know what it was like to live out in the new territories? The great Western expanse? Some people lived in small Westerntowns—smaller than any town you’ve ever seen. Imagine a handful of buildings clustered along a dirt road. A church, an inn, a general store, a saloon. If you were lucky, the church might have an organ, and the saloon might have a piano, and you might grow up knowing music, and community, and God. But some families didn’t even have that, girls. Some people lived all on their own, in the middle of nowhere, huddled against the elements of endless prairie or mountains or woods. No saloons or general stores. No music or neighbors or heavenly worship to speak of. Their meals were simple and their lives were honorable. By day, they caught and cooked and cleaned. By night, they sat around the fire to keep warm, and the adults entertained the children with tall tales about great battles in faraway lands.
How does that sound, girls? How would you like a life like that?
The sun is setting now. I’m sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. Through the window above the sink, I can see the sun falling behind the trees. Orange light spills through the warped glass panes, striping the room with radioactive glow.
My mind tilts and lurches uncontrollably, like a broken amusement park ride.I am not, I will not, I cannot—I think I mightbe—no,no—I am yourhusband—Mama?Mama!—
A few feet away from me, that girl is crouched by the fire, her skirt tucked carefully between her thighs to keep from catching flame. The only one whose name isn’t notched into the threshold. I watch her flip each potato half, one by one, revealing a series of perfectly crisped skins, and I think of the careful carvings in the wood, and I know, I just know, that she is the bookkeeper in charge of these records.
“Excuse me,” I say.
She doesn’t reply.
“Excuse me.What is your—”
The girl stands up and turns to face me, and at the sight of her face—like me, like Clementine,Lord saveme—I lose my train of thought. Her expression is not a crumble of disappointment, the way Maeve’s was earlier. Instead, she looks annoyed. “Mary,” she says. “My name is Mary. Now—will you go get more wood, please?”
I stare at the girl, suddenly sick.
“Mary,” I repeat.
She nods impatiently.
For hours now, my thoughts have fluttered and flitted tirelessly around me overhead. Now they stop short and drop out of the sky, one by one, until just one remains.
“Do you want to know the gender?” the technician said brightly.
“Sex,” I replied absently. It was summertime, a few months before Shannon quit. I was holding my phone steady as I recorded a video of the ultrasound screen; the Angry Women loved any chance they could get to crawl inside me. I glanced at the technician and added, “You mean the sex of the baby.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said gender. Not sex.”
The technician glanced helplessly at Caleb, who said, “Yes, we want to know.”
“All righty then, let’s just see what we can find …” The technician’s wand moved slowly over my stomach, like one of those deep-sea drones scanning the ocean floor for any possible signs of life. I stared at the gray matter, imagining my baby as a jellyfish, a sea otter; a darting silver minnow.
“Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Mills, you’re having a girl!”
“What do you think about the nameMary?” Caleb whispered as we left the office.
At that moment, there was a quiet little thud in my stomach. Her first kick. “That’s her name. Mary.”
Mary.
My mind—which felt like a beehive up until this moment, buzzing and angry and alive—now feels hollowed out, my brain not a brain at all but a husk of one, a plastic replica. “That’s a beautiful name,” I say numbly.
Did Caleb tell anyone we were going to name the baby Mary? It’s certainly possible. We had been calling the baby Mary out loud to each other; he might have mentioned it to his parents, or his brothers, or maybe a neighbor in town. But even if hedid—?
It’s hard to think clearly through my headache, which has returned in full force. I blink stupidly through the pain.
I hadn’t shared the name online, had I? No, definitely not. I did that only once, when I was pregnant with Junebug, and the experience was so miserable that I swore I would never do it again. I’d spent the last month of that pregnancy watching while thousands of people filled the comments section of my posts daily, ripping apart my child’s identity with glee, desecrating her existence before she even came into the world.
dear god the names keep getting worse
future ignorant bitch alert weee-ooo wee-ooo
But even if I hadn’t shared the name myself, that doesn’t mean someone might not have been able to guess it. Plenty of followers have guessed the names of our future children correctly in the past. When you have thousands of comments on a picture of your swollen stomach, it becomes a matter of odds—and besides, thereisonly a small collection of names that reasonably fits into our aesthetic. I know that.
