Nice Big American Baby

I went back to work on Tuesday.

Did I miss anything? I asked one of the men.

You were gone? he said.

I didn’t know his name; all the men who worked there looked alike. They were all too loud and had too much spit in their mouths.

I had a cubicle all my own, but I dreamed of an office with a door I could close.

A few days later, my father called. Your mother heard the results from the clinic, he said. The mammogram was fine.

That’s great, I said.

She doesn’t seem happy about it, he said. She’s acting very strange.

Oh, I said.

What’s going on, Lisa? he said. There’s something fishy going on here.

Nothing, I said. Ask your wife, I said. Can I talk to her?

She just dashed out for an appointment, told me to call you. She said you’d be relieved.

Yes.

I’m going to call your sister now, she was waiting to hear. Or do you want to call her?

I’ll do it, I said.

It seemed strange to me then that I would need to call Mitch. It felt like she was right here with me, living in my skin. Why should I have to pick up a phone?

We both went home for Christmas.

Later Mitch visited them.

Then I visited.

Then it was Mitch’s turn again.

When I called home during Mitch’s visit, my father said, Your mother was due for another mammogram, so I sent Lisa with her to make sure she goes.

You mean you sent Mitch, I said. I’m Lisa.

Yes, right. You know who I mean.

A few days later my father called. His voice sounded strained. Your mother talked to the mammography clinic today, he said, but she won’t tell me anything. She’s been in her room, crying. She’s been talking on the phone to your sister for an hour. I guess the doctors found something, but I’ll let you know when we know for sure.

OK.

I hung up and called Mitch.

Hello, she said. She sounded like she was choking on one of her pens.

Mitch, I said. It’s yours, isn’t it?

She sighed and said, It’s ridiculous, but I thought I was doing her a favor, I thought I was sparing her some worry.

You went in for her, didn’t you?

You know, Mitch said, she’s more worried about this than if she was the one. She feels like it’s her lump, like it was meant for her, like she gave it to me somehow.

That’s ridiculous, I said. It was like I was talking to myself.

Although, you know, if it were possible, I would, Mitch said. I mean, if there was somehow a way to magically take a lump out of her breast and put it in mine, I’d do it in a second.

I wish I could do that for you, I said.

Yeah, we could all share it.

One dessert and three forks, I said.

And later, as I sat alone on the floor in the apartment, I thought about being my mother’s daughter and my sister’s sister, and I felt my edges start to bleed a little. I remembered standing in a white room with my breast clamped in the jaws of a humming machine. I imagined the mammogram pictures like lunar landscapes, and I could not remember who had the lump anymore, it seemed we all did, and then the phone rang again and I picked it up and heard my father call out as he sometimes did: Leah-Lise-Mitch.

nadia

Our friend Joel got one of those mail-order brides. It was all perfectly legitimate: he made some calls, looked through the catalogs, comparison-shopped. He filled out the forms without lying about his income or his height. Where it asked MARITAL STATUS? he wrote Divorced! and When she left me I threw my ring into the sea. “That’s so romantic,” we all said when he did it. “No it wasn’t, it was stupid,” he said. “I could have sold that ring for a lot of money.” We insisted, “No, it’s very romantic.” “Do you think?” “Any woman would want you now,” we said, as we put on bathing suits and diving masks and headed down to the beach.

I’ll call her Nadia. That was not her name, but I’ll call her that to protect her identity. She came from a place where that was necessary. Nadia brings up images of Russian gymnasts. Or is it Romanian? Bulgarian? She had the sad ancient eyes, the strained-back hair, the small knotty muscles. The real Nadia, the famous Nadia, I forget what she did exactly; I have vague memories of her winning a gold medal with a grievous wound, a broken bone, a burst appendix. I think she defected. I picture her running across a no-man’s-land between her country and ours, dressed in her leotard and bare feet, sprinting across a barren minefield where tangles of barbed wire roll about like tumbleweeds and bullets rain down and bounce on the ground like hail.

But our Nadia, Joel’s Nadia, came wrapped as if to prevent breakage in a puffy quilted coat that covered her head to foot. She kept the hood up, the strings drawn tight so all we could see was her snout poking out. She must have been cold when she first came; she stood in his apartment, and wouldn’t take it off, and then went and leaned against the radiator. We were all there to welcome her; we had come bringing beer and wine and flavored vodkas: orange, pepper, vanilla.

It was an old-fashioned radiator and her coat must have been made of some cheap synthetic because it melted to the metal. When she tried to step away and found she couldn’t, she moved in a jerky panicked way that was strangely endearing. Joel tried to help her out of the coat but she wouldn’t let him, she jerked and flailed until the coat ripped open and the filling spilled out. It wasn’t down, it was like some kind of packing material, polystyrene peanuts or shredded paper.

It reminded me—a few months earlier I’d ordered some dishes, and when they came in the mail I found they’d been packed in popcorn, real popcorn. Some companies do this now, I’ve been told, because it’s biodegradable, more environment-friendly. I took out the dishes and wondered if I should eat all that popcorn, but it seemed unsanitary. It might have touched something, I don’t know, at the plant: dust, mouse droppings, the dirty hands of some factory worker. So I threw it away, this big box of popcorn. I still think about it. Probably that box could have fed Nadia’s whole family for a week.

Joel and Nadia had written to each other, their letters filtered and garbled by interpreters. They described themselves: hair, eyes, height, weight, preferences in food, drink, animals, colors, recreations. She could speak English but not write it; they had a few phone conversations. What could they possibly have talked about? What did she say? It was enough to make him pay the money, buy the tickets, sign the papers to bring her over the ocean.

These days, ever since her arrival, Joel looked happy. He had a sheen. Someone had cleaned the waxy buildup from his ears. We asked if she was different from the women here, if she had a way of walking, an extra flap of skin, a special smell. Did she smell of cigarettes, patchouli, foreign sewers, unbathedness?

“I think she has some extra bones in her spine,” he said. “She seems to have a lot of them. Like a string of beads. A rosary.”

We’d seen more of her by then, up close, coatless. Her hair was bright red, black at the roots, which gave her head the look of a tarnished penny.

“Tell us something about her,” we said.

He closed his eyes. “When I take off her shirt,” he said, “her breasts jump right into my hands, asking to be touched.”

He opened his eyes to see how we took that.

“Her nipples crinkle up,” he said, “like dried fruit. Apricots.”

“She has orange nipples?”

We’d always insisted that Joel be completely open with us, tell us everything and anything he would tell a male friend. How could we advise him unless he told us the truth? Utter frankness, we told him, was the basis of any mature friendship between men and women. He often seemed to be trying to test this theory, prove us wrong. “Frankness will be the death of any good relationship,” he’d say.

Joel was what we called a teddy-bear type, meaning he was large and hairy and gentle. He had a short soft beard all around his mouth so you could not see any lips. Hair grew in two bristly patches on the back of his neck. His fingertips were blunt and square, his eyes set far back in his head so that they were hard to read. His knees were knobby and full of personality, almost like two pudgy faces. In fact, he sometimes drew faces on them, to amuse his soccer team or us. Some of us had been in love with him once, but that was long past. Friendship was more important than any illusions of romance.

Nadia did not smile much. At first we thought it was because she was unhappy. Then she began smirking in an awful closed-lipped way so we thought she didn’t like us. It took us a while to understand that it was her smile. Eventually we discovered the reason: her teeth were amazing, gray and almost translucent, evidence of some vitamin deficiency. When she spoke, air whistled through them, giving her a charming lisp.

She spoke English well enough, with a singsong lilting accent that lifted the end of every word, so that each word sounded as if it ended with a curlicue, a kite tail, a question mark.

She trilled certain consonants. “Lovely,” she said and trilled the V. Trilled the V! Have you ever heard that before? She must have had some extra ridges on her tongue.

She burst into tears at unpredictable times. She needed her own bedroom, so he cleared out his home office for her. We saw her bed, a child-sized cot.

We began to suspect that he had done it all purely out of kindness, that he had wanted to rescue someone and give her a better home, a new life. He wanted to be a savior, not a husband. “Why didn’t he just adopt a child, then?” we asked each other.

I thought, Maybe I should adopt a child. I ought to have one of my own; people are always looking at me and saying “childbearing hips” as if it’s a compliment. But then I think of the rabbit my sister had as a pet when we were little girls. I remember holding him tightly to my chest until he stopped kicking. I was keeping him warm, but when I let go he was limp. We put him back in the cage for our father to find. I still dream of white fur, one sticky pink eye. I worry I might do the same to a baby. I could adopt a bigger one, a toddler. Not too sickly. But what if it doesn’t understand English?

Of course you want to help, but what can you do? We did what we could: we gave money to feed overseas orphans, money for artificial limbs and eye operations; we volunteered at local schools; we took meals to housebound invalids once a month; we passed out leaflets on street corners. A friend of mine volunteers to escort women past the protesters into abortion clinics and has invited me to join her, but it’s never a good day for me. We recycle. We get angry and self-righteous about what we see on the news. When I see a homeless person on the street I give whatever’s in my pocket.

It’s not enough. But what can you do? What can you do?

Joel had a friend, Malcolm, he was always promising to introduce us to. Malcolm worked for some global humanitarian organization. We saw him on television occasionally, reporting from some wartorn, decimated, or drought-stricken place, hospital beds in the background, people missing feet with flies clustered on their eyes, potbellied children washing their heads in what looks like a cesspool. Malcolm was balding but handsome in a weather-beaten cowboy way. His earnest face made you want to reach for your wallet. “That guy, he can relief-effort me any time,” we’d say to Joel. But we hadn’t met him yet. We were beginning to suspect he existed only inside the box and was not allowed out.

As for Nadia: “Where’s she from, exactly?” we asked Joel.

“A bad place,” he said, frowning. “Her village is right in the middle of contested territory, every week a new name. Don’t ask her about it. It makes her sad.”

“All right,” we said, but privately we wondered at his protecting her feelings like that. No one we knew had ever stopped talking about something because it made us sad. No one. Not even Joel. Was it because we were fat happy Americans, incapable of real sadness? Was it because he thought we had no feelings, or because he thought we were strong enough to bear sadness? Unlike poor delicate Nadia with her pink-rimmed eyes, Nadia who bought her clothes in the children’s department because she had no hips. She said she did it because the clothes were sturdier, better quality, would last longer.

Last longer? How much longer will she need green corduroy overalls, or narrow jeans with unicorns embroidered on the back pockets? How much longer before her hips swell and her legs thicken and her collarbone stops sticking out in that unbecoming way?

Her legs are not like American legs; they are pieces of string, flimsy and boneless.

“We’ll take her shopping,” we told Joel. “We’ll show her the ropes.”

“She’s doing just fine,” he said. “I’ll take her.”

I said, “You should be careful. I’ve heard, people like her, the first time they go to an American supermarket, they have seizures or pass out.”

“Why?” he said.

“They just can’t take it,” I said. “They’re not used to it. The … the abundance or something. Overstimulation.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. Nadia stood at the other end of the room, before a window, so that sunlight set her hair afire and shone right through her pink translucent ears. Her ankles were crossed, her arms folded, a cigarette hung from her fingers. The skin on her face, her arms, was so milky-white her ears didn’t seem to belong to her. Around her people moved in shadows.

“Do you know,” he said, “she lets me hold her hand. In public? Just walking down the street? All the time.”

He was beginning to talk like her, question marks in the wrong places.

“I love her,” he said, in a stupid way. He was talking like one of his moony students. There was something black floating in his drink, next to the ice cube, and he didn’t even notice.

“How do you hold hands?” I said. “Like this?”

“Well … no,” he said. “Usually.… I take her by the wrist. Or grab her thumb. But she doesn’t pull away. She lets me. She likes it.”

“Like this?” I said. “Or like this?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Her wrist is so little, my fingers go right around … like this, see, only hers are even smaller. I can hold them both in one hand.”

His palm was the same, still warm and damp, fingers long and blunt-tipped, hair on the backs. The hair almost hid the new wedding ring. There were bulgy things in the breast pockets of his shirt. The toe of my shoe was almost touching the toe of his. I wondered if she would look up and see us holding hands like this.

But she didn’t. She was absorbed in her cigarette, her halo of sunlight.

Joel was a high school teacher. He loved kids. People always said that about him, first thing: “He loves kids. Such a nice guy” We had always thought it was a wonderful thing about him; it meant he was caring, he was generous, he was nurturing, he was fun. He would be a terrific father. He taught chemistry; he coached the soccer team. He had won the Teacher of the Year plaque three different times. Kids came to him in tears, they trusted him that much, and he’d let them cry through a box of Kleenex and keep his mouth shut and the classroom door open, and then hand them over to the proper counselor or police officer or health-care worker. There had never been a bit of trouble. Not with the girls, not with anyone.He had perfected the art of the friendly distance, the arm’s-length intimacy. We had always known his girlfriend or wife would never have reason to worry about cheerleaders or teen temptresses. Joel was better than that.

At least, we had never suspected anything of him until he brought home this child bride, who must have weighed half of what he did, who sometimes wore her hair in two long braids. Then we had to wonder. Before, we liked to hear him talk about his students. Now there was something off about it, a sour note. “My kids,” he would say. “I love those kids. Do you know what they did? Stephanie Riser and Ashley Mink? Listen.…”And we would listen, but there was something tainting it now, a thin black thread.

“Don’t you think she’s a little too young?” we said.

“Nadia? No! She’s thirty-three.”

“No!” we said.

‘Yes,” he said, looking pleased.

“She must be lying,” we said. “She can’t be.”

“It’s right on her papers,” he said.

“As if that proves anything,” we said. But we said it nicely.

They bought a house together. What does that mean? He bought the house. It was his money. She contributed nothing. What did she do with herself all day? “She makes me happy,” Joel said. Her?

“She’s trained as a doctor,” he said. “She has to pass a test before she can practice here.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“It’s a source of great frustration. She has to relearn things she studied years ago, chemistry, anatomy, in a new language. You should see the size of these books.”

“Are you going to have children?” we asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

But there was no sign of them. So we kept asking.

“Of course,” he said.

“Later.

“Maybe.

“I don’t know.”

Of course we were really asking something else. We wondered if she had her own bedroom in the new house. But of course we couldn’t ask.

“He seems frustrated,” we told one another. “Yes, definitely. Bottled up.”

One of our old friends was chosen to be on a televised game show. We had a party to watch her and invited Joel and Nadia. We screamed when we saw her, taking her place among flashing lights and boldly punching her buzzer. But by the third question, a sweaty sheen had broken out above her upper lip. She faltered, mumbled, and in seconds she had disappeared forever. It was hard to work up any kind of real feeling; it was just dots on a screen. Only a game.

Joel seemed distracted. Nadia stared at the wall and then got up to use the bathroom.

“You have no idea what she’s been through,” Joel said, apropos of nothing. “You have no idea.”

Which is unfair; we have all known suffering, we have all known loss. Certainly I have, and Joel should have known that better than anyone.

The sun going behind clouds, trees creaking in the wind. The house Joel bought was all windows, making it easier for the weather to force its mood upon them. That’s how I explain the gloom. It was a sunless winter. She decorated the house herself, everything backward: hung rugs on the walls, stood dishes on their rims on the shelves, set table lamps on the floor, left the windows bare but hung curtains round the beds. She used a lot of red for someone so lacking in color.

Whenever we visited now she’d be listening to her own music. She’d found a station, way at one end of the AM dial, that played her type of thing. She’d play it for us if we asked her, to be polite. Horns and bells, nasal voices, songs like sobbing. More often, she’d listen to it on the headphones he’d given her, and he’d talk to us. It was easier this way. She sat among us with a blissful look on her face, and we could talk about her without worrying that she’d hear us.

We saw her country on the news sometimes. Shaky camera, people running. Trucks. Shouting. Crowds of people pulling at one another. Are they using black-and-white film, or is everything gray there? She refused to watch.

“Is she afraid she’ll see someone she knows? Does she want to block it all out? Does she still have family back there?”

“I don’t know,” Joel would say. We could no longer tell when he was lying.

“She doesn’t talk about her family?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s angry at them. Maybe they sold her to the mail-order people and took the money.”

“Maybe,” he said, in the way that meant he was not listening at all.

We could not get the picture out of our heads: Nadia ripped from the arms of … someone. By … someone. That part is hazy. We see the hands reaching out, Nadia crying silently. Women with kerchiefs on their heads weeping, men with huge mustaches looking stern, children hugging her knees. Nadia’s chin upraised, throat exposed, martyr light in her eyes. Her shabby relations counting the money and raising their hands to the heavens in thanks, the starving children already stuffing their mouths with bread. It would make a nice painting, Nadia standing among shadows and grubby faces with a shaft of light falling on her, the way it always does no matter where she stands.

Then again, maybe we’ve seen too many movies. “How do we know her family got the money?” I said. “Maybe she came here to get rich. Maybe she’s the gold digger. Maybe she thought high school teachers make a lot of money.”

I thought he’d be more willing to talk about it alone, without the others. I left work in the afternoon and went to his high school. I found him grading papers with a student sitting on his desk. She was sucking on a lollipop, swinging her legs, looked like a twenty-five-year-old pretending to be fifteen, her tiny rear just inches from Joel’s pen (purple; he said red was too harsh). She knocked her heels against the desk and he looked up.

“To what do I owe this?” he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the inside corners of his eyes. Heavy indentations marked the sides of his nose. His fingers left purply smudges. Ink and exhaustion had bruised his face like a boxer’s. The classroom had the sweaty gym-socks-and-hormones smell of all high schools. On top of that there was an aggressively floral smell that was coming off the girl and a stale, musty, old-man sort of smell that, I realized, was coming from Joel.

“Sondra,” he said, “go wait for your bus outside.”

“Okay, Mr. J,” she said, and slowly got up and fixed her skirt and sauntered out. Her bare thighs left two misty marks on the desk.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I said, tracing them with my finger.

“You have to know how to handle these kids,” he said. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get your goat, and the best thing to do is ignore them.” He wrote an X on a student’s paper, then scribbled over the X, then circled it, then wrote sorry in the margin.

“I still think—”

“They get bored in five minutes and do something else. Half these kids have ADD. They have the attention span of a fly.”

“I wanted to talk to you about—”

“What? What was that?” He’d gone back to his grading.

If you looked at those few square inches of skin on the nape of his neck, the backs of his ears, you could almost imagine little-boy Joel. A vulnerable angle, looking down at his hunched shoulders and thinning hair. On the desk in front of him, next to a jar full of pens and highlighters, was a tiny snapshot of Nadia set in an oval ceramic frame. The picture was too small and blurry to make out her face. A gesture, that’s all it was, having that photo there, nothing more. Joel’s hands stopped moving. A flush moved along his scalp. He waited.

It’s not a good time, I said, or thought, and left.

Clearly, he was upset. I was worried. We were all worried about Joel. His clothes were limp. He drooped. He yawned constantly. “Is it Nadia?” we said. At first he ignored us. We kept asking. Finally he nodded.

Just as we thought. She was abusing him, demanding things, running him ragged. We knew she had it in her. It’s the quiet shy ones who are the hardest inside. And Joel was too kind; of course he would give in to her. All she had to do was find his sensitive spots and pinch him there. We knew where they were. She could probably find them. They were not hard to find.

But no, he said. He said it wasn’t like that at all. “She’s sad,” he said, “about something. She won’t tell me. It’s killing me to see her so miserable.”

We worried. Why shouldn’t we? He was our friend. We’d known him for a long time, long enough to see changes in him, long enough to still see the face of younger-Joel embedded in the flesh of older-Joel. We had known him when his pores were small, his hair thick, and his body an inverted triangle rather than a pear. Of course we worried. We had a right to.