Offbeat: Uncollected Stories Read online

  Ted was waiting patiently when she finally straightened up.

  “ ’Scuse it,” Pat said.

  A half smile flickered over his lips.

  “Say,” he said, “I hope those tests we’re giving you don’t, well, disturb you.”

  Pat hesitated. Then she said:

  “Oh, they’re grand.”

  Ted didn’t get the sarcasm. He was satisfied.

  “They try to be tactful,” he said. “You know.”

  “I know.”

  She pointed quickly to the sheaf of papers on his lap.

  “What are those?” she asked.

  She’d only spoken to me once about the examinations and tests. But I knew she hated them.

  Ted grinned.

  “Want me to tell you about your baby?” he asked, almost shyly.

  Pat’s empty smile was gone. She pressed her hands together.

  “Our baby?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “We have almost all the facts now, excluding environmental contingencies, of course.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  She turned to me.

  “I don’t understand,” she said in a sharp disturbed voice.

  “What do you mean, Ted?” I asked, afraid of his answer. “Are you telling us you know more than just the sex of our baby?”

  “Why, of course,” he said as if astounded at our lack of comprehension. “Why, we know almost everything about him.”

  “Oh, my God,” I heard Pat say under her breath. Ted was looking at me. He didn’t hear her.

  “This is big,” he said. “Darn big. The embryonic period hardly completed and yet already we have lists and lists of figures on the baby.”

  I glanced hurriedly at Pat. She might have been hypnotized. She was gazing at Ted without blinking, her lips slightly parted, her hands clasped and motionless in her lap.

  I started to speak but Ted had already picked up a sheet.

  “Of course it’s to be a boy,” he said with crushing finality. “You already know that yourself.”

  “Of course,” Pat said. “That’s just child’s play.”

  She shuddered but Ted still didn’t notice. He kept looking at his papers. I tightened my arm around her. I could almost feel the revulsion sweeping over her. We had made a mistake. We knew it with terrible clarity. There was no need to speak of it. Words couldn’t have made the feeling any clearer or stronger. The horror of foreknowledge is beyond expression.

  “Well, I won’t go into all the details,” Ted started talking again. “You wouldn’t be interested in a good deal of it. Probably most of it would bore you.”

  Certainly! The thought cried out in my head. It’s only our baby. That’s a very boring subject.

  “Probable weights by week during pregnancy, figures on general-specific, anterior-posterior, central-peripheral sequences, development of muscle, tissue, so on, so on.”

  He went on telling us about things we wouldn’t be interested in; the way our child’s body was forming itself, expanding, developing, the unfelt heartbeats already throbbing energy through its living structure. He rattled off figures in a bored voice.

  Pat slid nervous hands over her forearms. I felt a dryness in my throat. I wanted to stop him, to scream: You idiot! Do you realize what you’re doing? Do you know you’re talking about our child? Do you know that you’re dissecting him right before our eyes?

  Ted glanced over another sheet.

  “Oh,” he said lightly. “This should interest you.”

  He nodded to himself.

  “The boy,” he said, “will have blue eyes and be blond like his father.”

  “Blue?” Pat said weakly. “Blue eyes?”

  “Mmm-hmm. He’ll weigh approximately seven and a quarter pounds at birth; barring environmental contingencies, of course. At your present rate of bodily development. If you . . .”

  “That’s enough!” I said.

  His mouth remained open. A look of mystification crossed his smooth young features.

  “What?” he said vaguely.

  “Excuse me,” Pat said. She got up and hurried from the room. The bedroom door shut noisily behind her.

  Ted sat there holding his papers.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  I got up.

  “Ted, will you go, please. I’m not throwing you out so don’t get offended. But Pat is upset.”

  “Well . . .”

  He slid the papers painstakingly into his briefcase until I could have hurled him through the window. He looked hurt. He’d been hoping for a great reaction to his list of figures. You could see that in his face. He hadn’t expected this.

  At the door he turned.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the case, “this wasn’t what upset her was it?”

  “It’s all right,” I said, opening the door.

  I ushered him out.

  “I thought you’d be anxious to learn all about the baby,” he said. “I thought . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said hurriedly.

  He went out, his face a picture of confused disappointment.

  “Well,” he said as I closed the door behind him. I heard his slow hesitant steps in the hallway.

  I went to the bedroom quickly, my mind filled with sudden resentment at the plight she was in. I thought that there was a mystery to birth that we had lost; a wonderful and enchanting mystery. I was thinking that to solve it is to destroy it.

  She was by the window. When I stepped behind her and put my arms on her shoulders I heard her talking to herself. She was staring at the light Sunday afternoon sky.

  “Blue,” she was whispering. “They’re going to be blue.”

  Five months.

  One cloudy evening I came home from work and found that Pat wasn’t in the living room where she usually was reading. She wasn’t in the kitchen either.

  She was sitting in the bedroom, slumped down on the bed looking at the floor. She wore a loose housecoat over her widening body.

  She looked up as I came in, her face stark with a helpless despair.

  “Baby, what’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Don’t call me baby,” she said quietly, without rancor. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

  I sat down by her side and put my arm around her. As I kissed her cheek, I noticed a large envelope on the floor. I bent over and picked it up.

  “DeMorgan Institute of Medical Research,” it read in the upper left hand corner.

  I pulled out the smooth square of paper inside. It was a color drawing of a little boy about four years old.

  He had blue eyes and blond hair.

  I felt my scalp tighten, my fingers twitched.

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s him,” she said in a flat tone that droned from her throat. “That’s what he’ll look like when he’s four. He’s not even born yet but that’s what he’ll look like when he’s four.”

  She shivered with nervous breath.

  “Barring environmental contingencies of course,” she said slowly and cruelly.

  “What’s the matter with them!” I said angrily. “I told them we didn’t want any more predictions! I told Ted a hundred times. What’s the matter with him?”

  “They probably thought we’d enjoy seeing what our little boy will look like when he’s four,” she said.

  I put down the picture and slid my arm around her.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day,” she said. “I’ve been here thinking about it. Why didn’t they send us a picture of what he’ll look like when he’s forty? Then we wouldn’t have to bother looking at him at all. We could just leave him in a corner and forget about him.”

  “Baby,” I said. “It’s all a guess, just a prediction. They can’t possibly know exactly what he’ll look like and how he’ll think and what his reaction will be to everything. There’s no way they can know. Don’t you see that?”

  “They kn
ow,” she said. “They know everything.”

  “They don’t,” I argued. “They can’t foresee accidents, they can’t . . .”

  I stopped short, my heart jolting. She had gasped. She was staring at me with wide eyes. Her coldness had gone, the shell had cracked.

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said. But she didn’t listen.

  “What if he dies?” she said in a low terrified voice. “What if he dies when he’s born!”

  “He won’t!”

  She snatched up the picture and looked at it in a fascination of horror.

  “Then this will be the picture of a ghost,” she said. “A ghost of a little boy who never even lived.”

  She turned it over suddenly and closed her eyes.

  “He’s a ghost already,” she said.

  “Stop it,” I told her.

  She ran shaking hands over her stomach and the portrait fluttered to the floor.

  “What does he think of it?” she murmured. “He doesn’t like it either. He must hate everybody; telling him when to be born and how much to weigh and what color eyes to have and how smart to be. Telling him what he can learn and what he can’t learn and how strong he’ll be and how weak he’ll be. He must hate us. He must . . .”

  Suddenly her body jerked convulsively and she sat up straight, her mouth molded into a dark square of fright.

  “He’s kicking me!” she cried. “He’s mad at me. He hates me! Davie!”

  She threw herself against me and clung to me.

  “He’s kicking me,” she sobbed. “Tell him to stop kicking me. Oh, please. Please, it hurts so. Stop! Make him stop kicking me!”

  Words jumbled and failed in my throat. I ran my hands over her hair, tried to hold her so tightly that she couldn’t tremble. I watched the hot tears running over her cheeks.

  And while I held her, I happened to look down at the portrait. My son gazed up at me. A quiet bemused smile lifted the ends of his delicate mouth. He seemed to be listening to the raindrops which were beginning to spatter against the window panes.

  Seven months. She never went out. She sat by the window and watched the cars pass, watched the bundled up children play in the cold street. She pressed her forehead against the window sometimes until the freezing glass numbed her flesh. Then she would lean back and rub her forehead slowly with a still quiet face.

  One night I came home from work and she didn’t greet me. And just the lack of that small act of turning around to say hello suddenly pointed up how terribly she had changed. I saw how sudden, how frightening the loss of youth can be.

  I stood by the door and, in the wall mirror, I looked at her face. It was blank and lost. Her unkempt brown hair straggled over her shoulders. She sat limply and motionless, staring out at the evening sky.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and bent over to kiss her.

  “Darling,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. I sat on the chair arm and put my arm around her. I didn’t know what to talk about. Only the baby was important now. Everything else faded away into obscurity­.

  And yet I couldn’t speak of the child. For I almost dreaded him. He seemed like some terrible stranger who had forced his life from Pat and myself, who had torn his body from hers and would soon reveal himself, alien and cruel.

  “What did you do today?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “How did . . .” I said.

  “Our scientist was here today,” she interrupted listlessly.

  My muscles tightened in fury.

  “I told him to leave you alone!”

  “They paid us money,” she said without feeling. “We haven’t any choice.”

  “He doesn’t have to come and torture you. That isn’t part of the experiment.”

  “They paid us money,” she said. “We have no rights. We sold our lives to them.”

  I kept waiting for her voice to rise, to sink, to tremble, to do anything but remain on that dull monotonous level. Her terrible dispassion was frightening.

  “Baby . . .”

  But I couldn’t call her that now. Not just because she told me not to. Somehow it didn’t fit any more.

  “Darling,” I said. “It’s only about two months now and then . . .”

  “The birth labor will commence at 7:15 p.m. on the day of March 28, 1976.”

  She said it as though she were reading a time table.

  “Pat.”

  “The rhythmic contractions will continue intermittently for five hours and seventeen minutes,” she went on, her voice spilling out like the mechanical croak of a robot.

  “Stop torturing yourself.”

  “At precisely 32 minutes after midnight on March 29, 1976, the child’s head will . . .”

  “Pat, stop it!”

  “The child’s head will . . .”

  I grabbed her arm and squeezed it. She stopped. She twisted her head around and dug her nails into her palms.

  “Excluding environmental contingencies, of course,” she sobbed bitterly.

  Then, abruptly, she drove a fist down on her right leg.

  “I’m a factory,” she cried. “They tell me what to make and I make it. I might as well be making an adding machine in my stomach!”

  She tried to stand up, but she was off balance, she was too heavy. She fell back in the chair and began to cry.

  It was like that all the time. She held it in, grew increasingly bitter. Then she broke down. And when that was over she was angry and reproachful again until the next breakdown. Day after day, week on week, beginning so far back I had forgotten the day.

  I held her against me, her body wracked by helpless sobbing. Every time she cried it was less and less human, less controlled. It was no longer the delicate weeping of the girl I had married. It was the shattered outcry of a person denuded of all hope. It was broken and defeated, the last heartbroken revolt in darkness.

  And every time she wept I told myself that it was the last time; dreading that I was right; that after that time she would no longer be able to cry. That she would lose her capacity for sorrow and become a cold unexpressive machine. Or worse.

  The eighth month.

  To herself, to the walls, to the universe, thin-lipped and sullen.

  “Why can’t it be a girl? What can’t it . . .”

  She couldn’t remain still for a moment. I never knew what she did in the daytime. But in the evening and night she would pace the floor heavily, stand by the window a minute or so, shifting her awkward weight from one foot to the other, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

  Then she’d walk slowly and ponderously into the kitchen. I’d hear her running the water in the darkness, talking to herself. I couldn’t make out the words. But they were always the same.

  “Why can’t it be a girl?”

  I’d get up to speak, to try and comfort her. But she’d brush past me and go into the bedroom. I’d find her looking at the portrait. One day she had sketched in long hair with vengeful pencil strokes. I never tried to erase it.

  She’d drop the picture on the floor and go back in the living room. Once more she’d stare out through the window, her shoulders twitching at the slightest noise, her fingers opening and closing together in monotonous rhythm.

  She never wanted to go out. She didn’t want to play cards or read or even talk to me. She hardly ever answered me. She was almost mute except for her one phrase.

  If I woke up late at night I would hear the rustle of the blankets as she slowly rubbed her stomach. And if I turned on the bedside lamp I would see her staring at the ceiling with wide-open eyes, her lips forming the soundless phrase again and again.

  “Why can’t it be a girl?”

  I tried to soothe, to calm, to make her speak. But she was always impassive now. It grew worse by the day. She wouldn’t sob or cry anymore. It was all bound up inside of her. And though her eyes glistened, no tears would ever fall.

  It was the ninth month.

  I hurried up the ste
ps anxiously the evening of March 25, 1976. In four days the child would be born.

  I unlocked the door and stepped into our apartment.

  I stood in the vestibule, dumbfounded.

  The living room was brightly lit. In the center of the rug, the folding table was set gaily with a snowy cloth and napkins. In the glow of two red candles, dishes, glasses and silverware sparkled.

  Pat was standing by the table. She looked up as I came in. Her hair was combed out, her makeup put on with meticulous care. She wore a light clean housedress around her swollen form.

  “Hello, darling,” she said lightly. She came over to me with quick waddling steps and kissed my cheek.

  “I’m so glad you came early,” she said. “The roast is just right now. You sit down and it’ll be ready in a jiffy.”

  I watched her bustle into the kitchen. I put down my paper and hat in the vestibule and went in the bathroom to wash up. I felt my heart beating rapidly. My hands shook as I rubbed soap on them.

  I sat down at the table, afraid to speak. I didn’t know why she was so happy and I was afraid I’d say something to shatter the whole moment for her.

  She set down a dripping brown roast on the table.

  “There!” she said triumphantly. “Isn’t that pretty?”

  I nodded weakly.

  “Yes,” I muttered. “It’s beautiful.”

  A silly laugh bubbled up in her throat as she sat down. She insisted on carving. I watched her and felt a shiver run through my body. I suddenly looked into her eyes. She glanced up at me and I lowered my gaze quickly and drank some water. I choked on it. She giggled. I put my hands on my lap to keep her from seeing how they shook.

  She filled my plate, chattering on about what she’d done all day, asking me what I’d done at the lab, not waiting for me to answer. I ate in silence as she talked and talked. She never mentioned the baby once. My muscles felt like taut wires.

  Then she suddenly paused. It was so silent that I looked up at her.

  She was smiling like a little girl withholding some magnificent surprise.

  “Guess what?” she blurted out, dropping her fork on her plate.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to have a girl!”

  I gaped at her without comprehension.

  “You’re going to have a . . .”