He sighed and opened his eyes.
It took several minutes for him to maneuver halfway inside me. It helped that I was wet. It didn’t help that he was about as hard as half-risen dough. I couldn’t believe it. All my life, I’d been imagining a sausage or a cucumber; something to fill me completely. I had not been prepared for sex to feel and to look like Caleb’s penis did, which was fine in girth and length but lacked the fortitude to enter me of its own accord. I felt like I needed to throw a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise.
The silver lining of Caleb’s softness was that losing my virginitydidn’t hurt. It felt more like a sponge was moving near my stomach; like someone was very gently cleaning me from the inside out. “I love you,” I whispered as he breathed heavily in my ear. “I love you, God, I love you, God—”
Caleb met his first missionary ejaculation with abject panic. “Oh holy shit,” he gasped. “What the hell?”
A year later, the spring of my sophomore year, I was walking to a review class for an upcoming final when I ran into Reena for the first time in a long while. The poor thing was not doing well. I was living off campus by then, in an apartment that Caleb’s parents had rented for us, so it spoke to just how big of a story this was that I’d overheard it in the hallways to begin with: the boy Reena had been seeing had unprotected anal sex with someone else. In response to that, Reena needed to get anAIDStest and had been so infuriated by her own humiliation that she retaliated by giving a blow job to his brother, a high school student who’d been visiting for the weekend, and in response tothat,her crush had called her a fat ugly whore in the middle of a packed dance floor. Lord have mercy on their souls. Now she looked awful, bloated and sweaty and hungover, like a human beer can. She was smoking a cigarette outside the building I needed to enter. When she saw me, her mouth actually fell open. “Natalie. My God.”
I was just past six months pregnant. She stared at my bump with a look that harkened a word I hadn’t thought of since childhood:gobsmacked.She looked absolutely gobsmacked.
“You’re glowing,” she said, with obvious disappointment.
I pointed at the cigarette in her fingers. “Do you mind?”
She stubbed out the cigarette, still eyeing me with abject surprise. I knew what she was thinking: I was twice as beautiful as I’d ever been. I’d never been ugly, per se, but there had always been a certain sharpness to my expression, a hawkishness to my gaze, that kept me from being outright attractive. At first I’d thought the pregnancy might have added some fat to my face, some much-needed softening. Eventually, though, I realized what it was that made me look so different: for the first time in my life, I was happy.
“I got married last summer,” I said. “To a man named Caleb Mills. He’s a senior. Do you know him?”
We smiled cagily at each other. “Of course I know him,” she said. “Well—I don’t know him, but I know of his dad. Obviously.” Her gaze reached my ring finger. “Congratulations.” Like she was swallowing a mouthful of blood.
“Where are you off to this summer?” I asked.
She stared longingly at the crushed cigarette by her boot. “An internship at McKinsey.”
It was exactly the kind of opportunity that girls like Reena said they wanted: competitive and respectful and well paid. And after all the time I’d spent online in those lonely months of my first semester—all those midnight hours poring through panicked chat threads and editorial screeds about the desperate plight of the uppity working woman—I knew exactly what would come next. As long as Reena didn’t screw up royally over the next few summers, she’d get a job offer from the firm after graduation, six figures right out of the gate.Living the dream!She would start working seventy or eighty hours a week, subsisting mostly on a diet of cocaine and Red Bull. Her coworkers would comprise a bullpen of male colleagues, men who screwed the small handful of women in the office nonstop, personally and professionally. From here on out, Reena’s life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends. If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary—smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter.No biggie!Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the same exact timeshe watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for. She would spend her twenties feeling disappointment and labeling it gratitude, and then she would convince herself that this was a form of Buddhist enlightenment:be happy with what you have.This is what she would tell herself each time she was faced with the fact that she had once again received less money, less praise, and even a smaller portion of blow than her male coworkers.Don’t forget to say thank you!Little bumps, little bumps. During this time period ofprofessional growth,Reena would also do her best to fall in love and get married, and if she managed that, then years later, when she finally got around to having kids, she would act utterly shocked when her doctor informed her she was a geriatric candidate, and it would be an uphill battle to get pregnant. If she was lucky (and from what I had seen, Reena had never been all that lucky), she’d have to do only one or two rounds ofIVF, and there would be only a small handful of months where she found herself joking loudly about lighting money on fire while her husband jabbed at the fat of her ass with a needle (his mind starting to wander past his miserable aging wife to the fun young assistant in his office, the one who was easy and light and funny, the one who had started to look subconsciously to him like the appropriate age for a woman to become pregnant), and when the time came, when Reena finally gave birth, when she finally looked around and realized she’d made it—she was at the top of the mountain,she had itall!—the landscape would look like this: her husband no longer wanted to touch her, and her boss no longer wanted to promote her, and her childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her, and her friendswithchildren no longer had time to see her, and Reena, sweet precious Reena, would complain about none of it, not the disappearing husband or the flailing career or the crushing loneliness, not a word of it to anyone, because she would technically be one of the lucky ones—a flush retirement account and four months’ maternity leave, in Jesus’s name, amen—and in the world that Reena would soon inhabit, you don’t get to complain about those kinds of problems. You don’t get to complain about privilege.
It was clear Reena was dreading it, not just the internship but the rest of her own life. As if she’d been shot through by some fairy-tale curse. As if she wasn’t one of the most spoiled people on the planet, free to do whatever she wanted, if only she had the brains or the courage to consider any other path forward beyond the one that feminism, that nasty witch, had offered her. Silly, stupid Reena had bitten the poisoned apple, straight down to the core. Standing there that day, she looked so miserable at the prospect of her own empowered future that I nearly laughed out loud.
“Well,” I said brightly, “congratulations to you too, then! I know those internships aresohard to get.” I was practically choking on my satisfaction at this point. The euphoria of my victory was making my vision blur.I won, I won, I won! You stupid fucking bitch (sorry, Lord), I won!
“Well,” Reena said, “I guess I’ll see you around or something.”
“You won’t, actually!” I couldn’t resist. I just couldn’t. “I’ve decided to leave school. Caleb’s graduating this spring, and I can always finish up my degree online. Wereallywant to spend some time in Paris before the baby comes. It’s a girl, by the way. Did I mention that? I’m having a girl.”
If I could’ve punctuated that sentence by socking Reena straight in her miserable little face, I would’ve. What perfect synchronicity that would have offered to our short, joyless relationship. Instead, I waved goodbye, making a point to really wiggle my fingers so the diamond caught the light, and then I slipped past her, the first angry woman in my life, and skipped forward into the future.
11
I dreamedI was giving birth on a farm in the middle of nowhere.
No—not right.
I dreamed I was giving many births—all the labor of my life—at once.
A doctor and a husband and a midwife stood over me. They shouted,PUSH.
I was terrified and calm and euphoric and regretful. The baby wouldn’t budge; the baby slipped right out. I felt the earth-shattering horror of the first time—on my back, staring wildly at an antiseptic ceiling—and the easy chemical slip of the following three, and the roaring triumph on all fours of the fifth—finally at home, finally in charge—and then dozens of babies were pouring out of me, one after another after another after another, crying and gasping on a dirty hardwood floor, bloodstains on my thighs, years of them, caked in sedimental layers on my skin—
The doctor and the husband and the midwife had mouths but no eyes. None of the babies had feet.MAMA!everyone cried.
12
On the fourth dayof a record heat wave in August, I met our first child, a six-pound girl with coal-black eyes. Clementine.
Caleb thought she was my clone. I thought she looked nothing like me. In fact, I didn’t think she looked like any baby I’d ever seen. Her eyes were so dark they appeared aquatic, and even when she was crying, her lips remained frozen in a perfect O, so that she almost looked like a wax doll with a sound machine buried inside. And what could I say about the way she looked at me when I was holding her in my arms? How else could I describe the expression of this child, if not malevolent?
Of course, I didn’t say this to anyone. In front of my mother and my husband and my in-laws and the nurses, I cooed and cried and said,Isn’t she perfect?But when I was alone with the baby, I held her at arm’s length. I whispered, “Who are you?”
