A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Read online

  Angela leaned forward and looked at the kid. She imagined him with a knife, a gun, or a fierce bare fist. She put the book back on the shelf and looked at Hunter. “What do you mean?” she said.

  “A lady-killer, you know—a stud with the girls.”

  “Oh,” Angela said. “Yes,” she said, “I understand.”

  8.

  When Hunter fell asleep she kissed his closed eyes, which scared him awake—and a man who starts his second morning with you, startled, who starts the day with your mouth that near his temples, always leaves without brushing his teeth or sharing a pot of coffee.

  9.

  It was their third date, and knowing Hunter was a vegetarian didn’t stop her from ordering roasted chicken. When he talked about going vegan, giving up his leather shoes and jacket, giving up butter and eggs, Angela nodded. She picked up a chicken leg and ate right from the bone.

  10.

  She let Hunter see her drunk early on.

  11.

  She let Hunter see her weep.

  12.

  She let Hunter see her weep when drunk.

  13.

  She introduced Hunter to her now unhappily married coworker, Margot, who was also a vegetarian and whose husband was not, and let them spend time together in her living room, knee to knee on the couch. Angela put on music, a tape she’d recently made of Beth Orton, PJ Harvey, and Cat Power, and went into the den to call her mother.

  Angela’s mother, a woman who refused to forget the past, was talking about Angela’s birth, some twenty-eight years ago. “Six weeks early,” her mother said. “You were born impatient.”

  “You act like being premature was my first bad decision,” Angela said.

  “Well,” her mother said, first as a statement, and then as a question. “Well? Well?’

  “Well what?” Angela said.

  Soon, the women were fighting and Angela found herself ignoring her guests in the other room. She found herself yelling into the phone, knowing that Hunter was probably looking at Margot’s legs and chest, and that even over the music he would hear Angela’s angry voice.

  As the argument between mother and daughter reached its peak, Angela pictured Hunter leaning closer and closer to Margot, laughing with her, believing each remark she made. She pictured Margot tossing her hair over a shoulder, expressing sympathy for rats and cows and bugs and wasps, and smiling at Hunter, and Angela understood, of course, that she was losing two people in the process.

  14.

  Angela said, “Sure, Hunter, go out with her, we’re not exclusive,” her tone suggesting that exclusivity was far from her heart when really it was right there inside its red chambers.

  15.

  She agreed to go out with Hunter’s friend Bucky, even though his name was Bucky, and she agreed to go out with him on the night that Hunter went out with Margot, and she pretended to be so okay about the whole thing and even suggested that the four of them meet up at midnight at the Blue Café downtown.

  Angela didn’t order the meatball appetizer right away even though she wanted it. As she sat across the table from Hunter, she gave him a friendly smile, which was different from a sexy smile, and made a conscious effort to keep her feet to herself.

  After three glasses of wine, she caved, ordered the meatballs and, using the colored toothpicks to pick them up, ate them one at a time.

  After four glasses of wine, her right foot shot away from her, but by then Hunter was too busy nuzzling unhappily married Margot’s ear to care that Angela’s foot in its black leather shoe was making its way up his pant leg—in fact, he was probably crediting unhappily married Margot for this bold act.

  16.

  Angela slept with Bucky even though his name was Bucky.

  17.

  After saying a rushed good-bye to Bucky in the morning, Angela called Hunter, got his answering machine, and hung up. Ten minutes later she called again. And ten minutes after that she tried once more.

  18.

  Angela called her mother, who had completely forgotten their fight from three days earlier, and told her the whole story, and asked her if she should call him again. When her mother said no, she called him anyway and threatened to throw away his CDs.

  19.

  When Hunter came over to pick up his CDs, Angela steered him into the dining room. Earlier in the day, she’d bought herself flowers, purple and yellow tulips. And as Hunter checked them out, bending at the waist and leaning toward them, she told herself that the gesture meant he was wondering where they came from, when everyone knows that tulips are a flower a woman buys for herself.

  20.

  There was a park near Hunter’s house, and sometimes she’d go there on her lunch break, sit on a bench, and eat her sandwich. Sometimes she sat there, skipped her lunch, and wept.

  21.

  Angela wanted to forget about Hunter, who hadn’t called her in two weeks, and she wanted the dust mites dead. She decided it was time to meet someone new, although she’d been warned that as a rebounding woman she was particularly vulnerable. She decided she’d try bombing her bedroom with insecticide, although she’d been warned that dust mites were invulnerable to the fumes.

  She set the mini-silo on her dresser, pulled off the red cap, and closed the bedroom door. She got down on her hands and knees, scooting a thick towel between the bottom of the door and the hallway carpet. She darted into the den, where she stayed for two hours watching the news, the same stories over and over—this girl kidnapped, that boy angry and shooting his teacher and three students in history class, that man stole a bundle and that woman left her twin babies in a hot car to die. Faintly, on the other side of the wall, spraying from the silo, she heard the hissing poison. She imagined the gray fumes falling on her things—her big bed, her strewn clothes, jeans and white T-shirt, a smelly mist blanketing the hardwood floor.

  While Angela had been trying to kill the dust mites, Rachel’s mother had undergone reconstructive breast surgery, so that night Angela, Rachel, and Claire went to Ruby’s Room to drink. Even though it was the middle of the week, they drank shots of tequila and chased that tequila with big, cold beers.

  Eventually, Angela left a drunk Rachel at the bar with a former boyfriend and went off with a man whose name she’d never be sure of, while his pink face, gruff manner, and the unlit cigar hanging from his lips would be forever etched in her memory.

  22.

  Even though she barely liked the nameless stranger, she carried the phone around the house for weeks and prayed for the damn thing to ring.

  23.

  Angela baked cookies with walnuts, even though the allergy doctor wasn’t a hundred percent certain about the dust mites and suggested that nuts might be offending substances, too.

  Still, Angela mixed the sugar and flour and butter and eggs first, then ripped open a bag of walnuts with her teeth. She poured the nuts into the batter and folded it all together with a flat spoon.

  While the oven preheated, she ate several spoonfuls of raw cookie dough and decided that her mother was right about one thing at least: her lack of patience, her unwillingness to wait.

  Angela sat at the kitchen table, within feet of the oven, feeling the heat and smelling the burning sugar.

  24.

  Two mornings after the walnuts and one morning after Rachel’s mother’s breast reconstruction, Angela woke up at her friend’s mother’s apartment, in her friend’s bed. The man whose name she’d never be sure of was gone, and she heard Rachel puttering about in the kitchen.

  Angela sat on the couch, drinking coffee with Rachel, who was asking all about Brad’s exit. “Do you remember him leaving?” she wanted to know.

  “I’m not even sure his name’s Brad,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “His friends called him Chuck.”

  “Lovely,” Rachel said.

  Angela sipped her coffee and looked at her friend, then away.

  “Maybe you should have brought him to your place,”
Rachel said.

  Angela shrugged.

  “I’ve always wondered why you bought that bed anyway,” Rachel said. “I mean, isn’t it too big for your room? I think you should have bought a full-size.”

  “Maybe so,” Angela said.

  “You know, you could sell it. You could put an ad in the newspaper and get rid of the thing,” Rachel said.

  Angela sipped her coffee. She was only half listening to her friend talk, her friend could have been talking about anything, really, she could have been talking about her mother, about the ocean outside the window, about her own troubles with men. Angela sipped her coffee. She sipped it again and again, becoming aware of her lips and the tingling that had begun there. She knew it was time to get to the hospital, that a shot of epinephrine would be waiting for her, and that without it, this time, her lips would grow and grow, surely they’d grow and grow, turning into red pillows or ridiculously big mattresses, this time they might just be the end of her …

  Rachel Spark

  2000

  Egg Girls

  1.

  I was in Los Angeles, at a dingy clinic on Sepulveda Boulevard, with all these very pregnant girls. Being over thirty, I had ten years on them, at least. We were lined up on the couch, a couple of girls reading magazines or pretending to, another few looking at the television, and every so often one girl tried to talk to another girl, asking some innocuous question, and was grudgingly answered or rebuffed, so Ms. Friendly went back to her magazine or book or whatever.

  We were in waiting room number 4, our final stop before the procedure, which meant we left our husband (doubtful) or parent or boyfriend or best friend in number 1, waited in number 2 to give blood and urine, waited in number 3 to be ushered toward a cubicle—behind a thin wall, and within earshot of the others—where we answered a stranger’s questions about our sexual history in hushed tones.

  This was the place they sent problem cases. That’s what I was, a problem. “We’re having a problem, Rachel,” they said last Saturday morning at The Family-Choice Center in Long Beach, two miles from where I taught at the university and ten blocks from where I lived. In all fairness to the center, they’d warned me, told me that I’d have to wait at least six weeks from conception, but, having found myself pregnant by the traveling British journalist—my green-eyed five-night stand, my Hampshire farmer—I couldn’t wait. “Yes,” I snapped at my student Ella, who, to my surprise, worked at the clinic and whose voice I heard before I even saw her. It was Ella calling me to the little window, and Ella handing me the papers to sign, and then, to my horror, it was Ella sitting across from me in the cubicle, asking those personal fucking questions. It was almost enough to make me fail my star student.

  “Is there someone else I can talk to?” I said.

  “There’s a wait,” she said. “If you’d rather talk to someone else, I understand, but it will be a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  I wasn’t happy and I’m sure it showed.

  “I’m a professional,” Ella said weakly.

  “It’s not you,” I said, throwing my hands up, frustrated. “Or maybe it is. It doesn’t help, you know?”

  Ella nodded, sympathetically. “I know, Dr. Spark.”

  “I’m not a doctor, Ella. I’m anything but a doctor. Call me Rachel. I don’t even have a doctorate degree.”

  “I’m sorry, Rachel. I forgot.” Ella paused. She looked down at her clipboard. She tapped her pen on her knee and looked at me. “It’s been six weeks, then,” Ella said. It was more a comment than a question.

  “I said six—maybe it’s been seven,” I said. I calculated, counted in my head, and okay, I was early, a liar on top of everything else, but just by four days. I didn’t think it would make a difference, but apparently it did, because now it was my second abortion—or attempt—in a week, because there I was on that couch with these ridiculously pregnant girls, and I was the only one not showing. I mean, they were big—not the kind of pregnant that’s a secret, but visibly, stomach out, swollen breasts, the whole thing. They came back three days in a row for what they called insertions.

  “I’m just here for an insertion,” the biggest girl of all told me. She had a white bow on top of her head. She was huge, massive, tall and fat, with long legs like trees. One tree leg was crossed over the other, or trying to, and because she was sitting next to me, the bottom of her blue bootie was just inches from my bare knee. In addition to the bow, she was wearing little baby barrettes, pink, one on each side, holding back her hair. The barrettes were extra tiny, absurd on a girl like her. Her hairdo was way too busy. Just who would be with her, I was thinking, who’d make her pregnant, who’d pull those barrettes out, who’d set that silly bow aside and fuck her, that’s what I wanted to know, which wasn’t nice of me, I understood, but I was thinking it nonetheless. I was blaming my hormones. I was blaming Rex. I blamed myself and the condom I didn’t use. I blamed my mother’s breast cancer, which had recurred, popped up, chewing and chewing at her hip and neck.

  I wondered if the big girl hadn’t been aware of her pregnancy, like a woman Angela told me about who gave birth in the toilet. The woman thought she was taking a shit like any other shit, Angela said, and then wham—a baby boy. I wondered if the big girl next to me had the same problem, if she kept growing and growing, from Monday to Monday, thicker and thicker, like a balloon or cream puff, without a conscious idea of what was happening. Like a woman with a breast tumor who convinces herself it’s benign, who goes into denial before her diagnosis, and so she waits and waits, months, a year perhaps, for a biopsy. Had the big girl next to me made excuses when her pants wouldn’t zip, when the button popped off her best skirt?

  There were a half dozen of us sitting on the couch, which was beige or gray, a cardboard color, and we were wearing white paper robes, and most of us, everyone but me, like I said, were obvious and round. We were watching General Hospital on a tiny television, the sound turned down low, quiet until the commercials began. A commercial for eggs came on, an animated thing, where a dozen eggs with faces popped out of their crate and danced around. They had eyelashes, these eggs, and lipstick. They were blushing pink, singing a song. “Scrambled or fried, poached or baked,” they squealed. A voice-over declared that eggs weren’t nearly as bad for you as the healthy-heart people claimed. His voice was deep, serious, when compared to the squealing eggs, and he was saying that they were all wrong about cholesterol, that four eggs a week was good for you. I was thinking that we looked like eggs, us swollen girls in white, sitting on a couch the color of cardboard. I was thinking that maybe I’d go home and write a poem about us egg girls when the biggest egg of all, the girl next to me, said, “You know what they are?”

  “Dancing eggs,” I answered.

  “Not them,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  I shrugged. I wanted to be left alone.

  “Insertions. I’m talking about insertions.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what they are?” she said again.

  “No, I don’t want—”

  “It’s seaweed or something,” she interrupted.

  I nodded, but didn’t look at the girl. I stared hard at the television. General Hospital was back on, and I was pretending that the story line was more important than real life, that the pretty couple on TV and their impending divorce outweighed what we egg girls had going on there.

  “It’s supposed to make me, or it, easier to get to. I’ve been here a couple times already. Someone said my vagina might be open enough today, but I doubt it.”

  “It’s your cervix,” I told her, still not looking her way.

  “What?”

  “They want your cervix to dilate.”

  “Vagina, cervix, what’s the difference?”

  “There’s a difference, believe me.”

  “Well, anyway, like I was saying, that nurse who took my blood, she said I might be open enough.”

  “That’s n
ice,” I said.

  “Don’t get too excited,” the girl said, sarcastically.

  “I won’t.”

  “Because I’m not lucky that way. If everyone but the lucky ones come back here three days in a row, then I’ll be here four, maybe even five, you watch.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “It’s true. I’m unlucky—well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?” She let out a small laugh. She patted her stomach and sighed.

  “Guess so.”

  “This is how it works. They’ve got you on a table, legs spread wide. I mean, they could stuff a TV in your honeypot if they wanted to.” My new friend was working with her hands and arms now, elbows together, making a V. “They take this stuff, it’s seaweed, I think it’s seaweed, is it seaweed?” she asked the girl on her left. The girl shrugged. She wet her finger with her tongue, then used it to turn the page of the magazine in her lap. She lifted the magazine in the air, blocking the biggest girl from her view. “It’s seaweed,” my pal concluded, “and they’ve got your legs spread—”

  “Look,” I said, turning to her for the first time, “I’m not here for an insertion, okay?”

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  “I’m early,” I said.

  “So?”

  “I’m barely pregnant.” I turned back to the television.

  “I’m just telling you what they do.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said, sarcastically.

  “Don’t you like to know what goes on behind closed doors?”

  “No, really—”

  “They stick this stuff inside of you and—”

  “Please,” I said. “Stop.”

  “You’re weird,” the girl said. “It’s all over your face, how weird you are.”

  I thought about my face then, what it was or was not giving away. “Can’t we just wait our turn?” I said.

  “We are waiting.”

  “I mean, quietly.”