Violet put a hand to her stomach, unsure whether the rumbling she felt was an effect of hunger or the thing inside her. Less than two months in, it was too early to be the kick of legs or poking digits, but like all uncommon sensations she’d experienced since discovering her predicament, she ascribed it to the baby. Or fetus, whatever she was meant to call it. When she did her research on Reddit (using, of course, an Incognito browser window), the more assuredly pro-choice voices had favored the term bundle of cells.
The kids were squealing loudly from the floor, where they sat with their hands linked like in a prayer circle; they chanted quacka-dilly-oso, their palms turned up and twitching in fear of the disqualifying slap. Violet held the garbage bag, tossing in sticky plastic cups and paper plates smudged with chocolate frosting. She was charmed by their increasingly loud and tuneless chorus, but couldn’t show it on her face: her lips were sealed tight and prim to contain her breath, the odors of the trash bag overwhelming her newly heightened sense of smell. She reflected that babysitting wasn’t the best gig for this particular sensitivity, but Lisa, eight, and Benji, five as of today, had full bladder control and all of that, so most days were fine. Soon, anyway, it would be a non-issue. Her appointment was fast approaching, and then it would be like nothing had ever happened, the miniscule event inside her leaving no trace. Like a virus her immune system could snuff out before any symptoms alerted her to its presence.
Natasha, the children’s mother, flew between rooms, buzzing with the gratification of containing disasters. The other mothers were returning, a new steady rap resounding from the door every so often. Natasha answered each time, leading them to the sitting room to join the mini catch-up session that had formed there: the party was small, limited to close friends. Violet watched the women’s sweet, tired eyes light up in the doorway, and she observed the grown-up language that each of them shared with Natasha as they wandered with her to the other room. She eavesdropped when her tasks brought her near to them, and wished a few times to enter the conversation—but whenever she drew in breath as if to call out a comically unexpected remark, she felt awkward and intrusive and decided against it.
The mothers seemed to share the sense they ought to wait to tell the children to pack up and put on shoes. Let’s delay, they all agreed, the inevitable wails of disproportionate sorrow, the whining pleas for five more minutes and then two more to play. After all, it was January, and the darkening evenings took their toll on everybody despite the unusual warmth. The unplanned soirée was bringing much-needed cheer, and felt like precious, stolen time.
When another knock sounded, Natasha rushed back to swing open the door, revealing Bibi Nordstrom. Violet had already recognized her by her silhouette through the milky glass, shaped by the big watermelon belly that extruded from her slim frame. The discrepancy between that roundness and the straight, angular quality of Bibi’s limbs had always made it seem like she wasn’t really pregnant, like she was just an incompetent smuggler. Violet pictured a basketball wobbling under her blue dress, precariously balanced on a skinny and slightly concave stomach.
She turned her head so that she wouldn’t stare. Balloons wavered all around the kitchen. She’d spent her whole morning pumping them by hand, and now they bobbed anxiously in the air, silently deflating. Even so, they shared the swollen look of Bibi’s belly: taut to the point of fragility.
As the two women greeted one another, Violet peered discreetly from her position behind the kitchen counter. Natasha’s hands touched Bibi’s narrow, graceful arms, and her head bent kindly to the side as she commented on her friend’s growing belly with a high-voiced musicality.
Natasha called out now from the threshold, and Violet’s eyes swooped down quickly. Then she looked back up, as if focusing on the two mothers for the first time. “Violet, sweetie, I think we’re gonna break out a bottle of wine,” said Natasha. “Could you grab some glasses for me?” She looked at Bibi with a saucy wiggle of her shoulders. “I mean, what’s the harm, right?”
“Well, for me it could do some harm!” said Bibi. She leaned forward at Natasha beak-first, and the two women laughed together.
As they moved into the other room, Violet stood on the tips of her toes to reach the wine glasses on the top shelf of the cabinet (“Tippy-toes! Tippy-toes!” called Benji and Lisa, an ongoing joke with their babysitter, and she smiled at them and chanted back). She wove the delicate glass stems between the fingers of her left hand, watching how the slender rims gleamed pleasantly in the light. The voluptuous shape of the glasses seemed tied to their air of sophistication, of adulthood; Violet liked handling them.
She nodded politely when the women greeted her with enthusiastic hellos and introductions, and she bent down to place their glasses on the coffee table, clear glass rimmed in gold metal. She skipped over Bibi with a promise to get her water with ice.
“Oh, you are so lovely,” said Bibi, clasping her hands in front of her heart. “That’s alright, I brought my water bottle with me.”
“What did she do this time?” said Natasha to laughter, entering the room with a dark bottle in her hands. “No, she really is lovely. I’ll be lost when she goes to college next year.” She fixed Violet with a warm look, then filled the scattered glasses one by one.
“Where are you going?” asked Nina. She had never been to the house before, and had just introduced herself to Violet earlier that night. She was one of the newer additions to the social circle, ever since her son Téo bonded with Benji over their matching anime lunchboxes.
“I’m still waiting to find out,” said Violet. “I just got my final applications in a few weeks ago.” She was the only one standing, and it caused her to fidget. But the women’s friendly atmosphere made her feel welcome despite her nerves, and at Natasha’s gesture she settled next to Bibi on the couch. The mothers cooed, asking her questions about school: what she expected her major to be, and if she was looking forward to meeting college boys. Violet fielded the questions not with grace, exactly, but with a pleasant kind of awkwardness that seemed to charm them. But they soon moved on from Violet and her future to Bibi and her stomach.
“I loved the feeling of being pregnant,” said Natasha, sighing. “Loved it, both times. It’s just magical.”
“That’s just a snobby way to say you had an easy pregnancy,” said Emily. She winked to convey that her comment was good-natured; she and Natasha had been close for many years. “God, if you think Jo is stubborn now? In the womb she was worse.”
The mothers commiserated over the difficulties of their pregnancies, some universal, some particular. They complained of nausea, trouble sleeping, anxiety over the health of their unborn children. They explored, for a while, the pain of watching their bodies change without their permission. The wounds were still fresh. They still felt betrayed by the stretching of skin, stomachs, feet, and even noses. The women in front of Violet looked small and refined, but their lamentations conjured disturbing images of their pregnant selves: in Violet’s mind they were big, hulking monster-women, ten feet tall, with gorilla arms that hung down to the floor. She put a hand to her stomach, which was small—almost flat, still—and as she breathed in, she felt panic. Her diaphragm expanding with air felt like a speedy, uncontainable growth under her palm.
Next week, she reminded herself, it will be over. Next week. She remembered the promises she’d made herself, eighteen long days ago, when she first discovered her pregnancy. It had stunned her to find that stark message contained in fuzzy pixels, to confront a life-altering announcement on a flimsy little stick. But she’d quickly decided the pregnancy, too, was flimsy: it was shoddy craftsmanship, the happenstance of a newly minted sex life and an uncharacteristic one-time consent to forego the condoms. It wasn’t meaningful; the questions raised were easily answered, then as now. It had taken no more than a few covert Internet searches to figure out the situation, an empty house to make the phone call. She breathed slowly and relaxed, her fingers trailing gently from her belly to the comforting velvet of the couch.
“Oh no, we’re scaring you!” said Emily now, looking right in Violet’s direction. Heat struck her skin again, and her mind scrambled to figure out how the older woman could possibly know. But Bibi’s voice sounded next to her, and Violet realized that she had not been the one Emily was speaking to.
“I’m a little scared,” said Bibi, “About you all with two kids saying it’s harder to get your body back the second time.” She fiddled with her wedding ring, turning it around on her finger. It seemed to take some effort, as though the ring had shrunk since she first put it on. Violet wondered if swollen fingers were an effect of pregnancy, too—it was hard to keep track of all the symptoms, so many of them bizarre. “But you all look beautiful, so I know it’s nothing to worry about.”
Now, intent on catering to Bibi, the women began to speak of everything they’d loved, or learned to embrace, about their own pregnancies. They took turns sharing reflections, their collective reminiscence acquiring an almost hymnal quality that pulled Violet’s imagination outside of herself.
“It’s amazing,” said Natasha. Violet always felt tender and attentive when her kind employer spoke, like a kindergartener enamored with her favorite teacher during storytime. “You’re creating a whole human being from scratch inside you.”
“I like that,” said Nina, “‘From scratch.’ It rings very true. You have all the ingredients inside, and you bake them up into something incredible.” The others hmmed, interested in Nina’s thoughtfulness. “I mean, I know my husband was involved in the process,” she said suggestively, prompting the others to laugh, “But it felt like I was making Téo from scratch, like you say. And he came out and he was mine, he was me. And I just felt so proud.”
Everyone thought this over for a moment, and then Susan, Lilabet’s mom, chimed in. “It changes your relationship with your body, doesn’t it?” she said, looking around at the others. She spoke with her eyes narrowed, as though she might be trying to discern something in the distance. “Knowing it can do something so major.”
“Absolutely,” said Emily. “For what—almost two decades?––I got my period every month, and it was just this random thing my body threw at me. But then, the first time I got it back after my pregnancy, I was like…” she trailed off, searching for words. “It was like, woah, all these years my body has been doing all these things I never even really thought about. Doing things all the time just to give me this—this gift, of my baby.” As she finished speaking she looked down at the glass in her hands, drained but for a tint of crimson. She took a breath as she poured herself more wine, its dark opacity chasing emptiness from the globe of her cup. “Not to sound pretentious. Pretty soon after that I was treating my period like just another hassle all over again.”
“I hate my period,” interjected Violet. Immediately, she felt embarrassed––the comment had burst out of her before she could consider it further. In fact, she reflected ironically, she was currently in the unusual position of longing for the routine aggravations of her period. But this was her typical phrase on the matter, and at Emily’s mention of periods she had felt an illicit glimmer in her chest. Unaccustomed to talking about this with older women, her excitement had compelled her to speak without thinking.
The room laughed, and Emily politely asked Violet to elaborate. “It’s annoying, I guess,” she said at first. Then, pushing herself to express her thoughts with more depth, she continued. “Sometimes it makes me feel like my body’s a machine. And I’m just a slave to it. And like, I want a baby someday, but I don’t need this whole machine working in me right now. It’s like my body is deciding for me.” She paused. “And why did it decide when I was twelve? That’s kind of gross.”
The mothers peered at her. “That’s interesting, Violet,” said Nina. Her eyes met Natasha’s, and both women smiled knowingly. Their conspiratorial look didn’t bother her: it wasn’t unkind, and it didn’t surprise her that they found her naive. But she did wish she could know what it meant.
“You know, it is machinery. It’s all machinery,” said Natasha, waving her hands around. “Your body just turns on one day, and then it’s always ready to make a baby, since that’s what it thinks it’s made for. And pregnancy is a very specific biological process, too: your doctors tell you every little thing that’s happening with your mucus and your cervix, whatever, all kinds of things you don’t even want to know. But look at what a beautiful thing it’s been for all of us in this room.” She gestured at the mothers, spaced along the two couches like a counsel. “So you can break it all down scientifically, sure—pregnancy, periods—but it’s ultimately down to magic, don’t you think?”
The others nodded, and Violet felt as though she was walking through walls: keenly aware of how the mothers saw her, as a young girl totally removed from the very significant experience from which they derived their maturity and wisdom, at the same time she felt herself drifting invisibly into their midst and becoming one of them in secret. She wished she could tell them about her own pregnancy experience. She felt that it must still count somehow, even though it was destined to be transient. She wanted to share her thoughts, for her views to mingle harmoniously with theirs. What was happening to her was a rite of passage. She wanted to participate in it, at least, before it ended.
“But here we are,” Natasha said, “yammering on when we have an actual pregnant woman in our midst. Bibi, how are you feeling, really?” Many pairs of unblinking eyes now turned uniformly toward the woman next to Violet, fixed in gracious, attentive expressions.
Violet found that, given the proximity of their gazes to her own face, she could stare back into them for the effect of a mutual looking. One by one she greeted each pair of eyes with her own, and though none of them darted the small distance that would make it a real meeting, she felt a sensation of silent communion that excited her. She made up for herself what meanings might be hidden in their faces, sculpted by middle age to a lined but lush refinement. It was invigorating to feel like they knew, that they saw her as a pregnant woman, even as her heart beat uncomfortably at the thought of being known as a pregnant teenager. Wishfully, she allowed herself to become their peer in her mind, pretending their words were directed intentionally at her. Within that imagined telling, she felt the weight of her indeterminate and vulnerable future. The choices she had yet to make, and the countless confusions of life she had yet to confront or even conceive of.
“Well,” Bibi began, “it’s hard. I’m towards the end, so I’m excited and I’m nervous. Very nervous.” Bibi had a small and steady voice, gently emphatic. It hadn’t come through before, in the brief and energetic appearances she’d made dropping off her kids with Violet in the past. But its high pitch and soft tone commanded attention here, in the open and generous environment the mothers had created. “As some of you know, I did go through postpartum when Martin was born, and that was…a very dark experience.” Susan leaned over to pat her friend’s arm. “But everyone is saying such thoughtful things, so I wanted to say something I’ve been thinking about.”
Bibi continued, “There’s a lot of pain and frustration in pregnancy. I had to give birth without an epidural, too, even though I planned to have one, and that pain is just…well, some of you know. And I don’t want that to happen again.” This idea brought Violet’s anxieties back to the fore, as though she might break out into a spontaneous early birth at any moment. But she trained her interest on the coming words, wanting very much to hear what Bibi, her unknowing mirror, had to say. “But something that has been helping me is to remind myself that this struggle is a trial, really, for actually having the kid. All these months, you keep asking yourself: Why am I doing this? Why am I enduring all this discomfort, this misery? I can’t even sleep half the time, and I’m so out of it I don’t feel like myself.
“Well, every time you have to answer yourself: Why am I doing this?” Her palms lay open on her lap, as if holding the question there. “I’m doing it to bring life into the world. To have my baby. You learn to sacrifice yourself for something you love, that’s bigger than you. And that’s the reality of motherhood. That’s what it takes from you, and that’s what it gives you. When I remember that, even with all the discomfort of lugging this big belly around I feel strong. In fact, I think that pregnancy, and being a mother, is the main thing that has shown me how strong I am.” Bibi’s eyes wandered over the hill of her belly like travelers, and her delicate hands settled, too, on that terrain. They looked undeniably vulnerable, with their visible ridges of bone and vein, yet their frailty endowed them with the special nobility of the weak defending the weaker.
Following Bibi’s monologue and her friends’ admiring replies, Benji scrambled into the sitting room, interrupting the conversation. He crawled energetically onto Violet’s lap and tugged on her sleeves, begging her to bring the chocolate cake back out of the fridge. She linked her arms around his small body, squishy and flexible as a toy, and the mothers giggled and sighed at the closeness of the two young people in the room.
Violet blinked her eyes many times over, seized by a powerful emotion as the child swung forward and back in her arms. It was a well established fact, for her, that she wanted one. And all that the mothers had described—everything must look different, she thought, when you go through the world knowing there is life inside you. How could she give this up so quickly, before even starting to feel that difference? She had only known of her pregnancy for a short time. Perhaps it was a gift she ought to treasure a little longer, peeking inside this in-between space and beginning to explore instead of slapping it shut. She did not want to be a pregnant teenager, no. But she had been presented with a rare opportunity. With her pregnancy, a trial one, she could get a reliable if grainy image of her own future, a sense of her life’s meaning that might reach back and illuminate herself even in the present. And, perhaps, the chance to feel something beautiful. But she was afraid to delay: she wanted, also, the discoveries of college, of independent adulthood, and did not want to be suddenly severed from her peers.
Benji implored her to return to the room where the children still were playing, and when she promised to come by shortly, he nimbly extracted himself from her hold and hurried back. But Violet was not sure she wanted to return yet from the heady, dense quality of the grown-up room, and go back to the lighthearted joy and babble of the games. Absorbing the women’s deep and mellow voices, she was thinking. Over the course of the expansive hour, a wordless, shapeless understanding had brought a certain weight to her awareness, and now, through her investigation, finally she got close enough to decipher it: her appointment was next week, but she would not go.
It sounded strange on paper to delay an abortion she was certain she wanted. But on a gut level, it felt not only sensible but necessary. From her experience thus far, it really didn’t seem like such a big risk; with all her waffling about schools, and her future, so far she had found herself surprisingly steady and in control of this situation. She wanted to get to know her pregnancy, the light with which it might glow, before she extinguished it.
So she had decided. She would only end it once she was sure it had begun: when she could know she had felt, if only briefly, a touch of that magic.
◆
In the following weeks, Violet paid more attention to the changes in her body. Night after night, she sat on the floor in front of the mirror, stripped her clothes off, and tried to find growth in her stomach. This felt strange, after a lifetime of beseeching her abdomen to stay flat and get flatter; and now, instead of pushing air out to suck her belly in, she breathed deeply to create the look of roundness. She inhaled with the careful fervor of a long drink, and with a focused gaze she watched the image in the mirror expand. She looked for a mother in that reflected, rounded body, but it was only air: she breathed out and the fertile curve vanished. She was a girl, uninitiated and singular. A self untethered to any other, formless as wet paper.
After a few weeks of this uninspiring breath work, still Violet felt disconnected. She was desperate to get in touch with what was happening to her: now she spent her evenings with her hands pressed to her stomach, picturing the fetus inside. Her research told her it should be about the size of a walnut. She labored to hold the image in her mind as she closed her eyes, pushing her hands hard against the giving flesh of her belly and trying to imagine the tiny fingers and newly developing nose and lips. She tried to feel love, then pity, then hatred. Her heart drummed on imperceptibly.
Despite herself, Violet’s thoughts kept wandering away to her typical concerns, the onslaught of school work and the edgy attitudes of her friends. This was a source of serious frustration, and whenever she caught herself plotting out what homework to do on which day of the week, or rehearsing angry conversations in her head (as a fantastical version of herself who was capable of expressing anger), she shot upward from her cozy position and swore.
It was bizarre, to her, that she would continue to be preoccupied by these mundane, secondary issues. Couldn’t she put them aside, if only for a moment? She thought of her visit to the Sistine Chapel, many years ago, when her family vacationed in Italy the summer after middle school. While her mother dusted off her art history degree to lecture them on the seemingly endless clusters of cherubim, again and again Violet had fixed her gaze skyward, trying to take in the heavenly portraits and gilded swirls that shone with a dimensional light. Yet always her eyes floated down to her own frame, anxiously assessing the short skirt she’d worn and learned, after the fact, was bound to strike the stewards of the holy place as totally inadequate and crass. She was embarrassed to find that she could only focus on herself.
She scrolled through online articles. The CGI renderings reminded her of a kids’ show that Benji and Lisa always watched––there was a Jack-in-a-box character styled as a baby’s head that bounced on a spring. It sang high-pitched, clownish songs in every episode. Its signature melody kept playing in Violet’s head as she tried to focus, and she’d shake her head with a jerk, trying to toss out the irritating tune.
If only she could feel, for a single night, a true feeling of being pregnant. In place of the vague and purely superficial fear she felt as the weeks crept on, by now she would accept any emotion about her condition, so long as it was real, direct, vital. She would take whatever lesson presented itself and stow it away for the future. Although, she continued to hope almost secretly that the feeling might be beautiful: she imagined a golden warmth swirling from her belly to her heart, her eyes flashing with the sudden vision of the child. But the images in her head seemed artificial, unrelated to the substance that presumably resided even at that moment in her belly.
The fetus also had a tail, according to the Internet, and that peculiar fact was another regular assault on her efforts at rapture—the word infestation came to mind. She repeated the phrase to herself like a tic as the days carried on: it’s like an infestation. But in truth, she understood that the idea had drifted into her thoughts without disgust, and had only stuck because it thrilled her with its acidity; its impact on her gut feelings was so mild that at a certain point she had to accept its insignificance. Frankly, it was a blandly scientific fact, striking her with little more than vague intrigue despite its supposed relevance to her body. What an animal process it all was, predetermined by the primordial force of evolution. It was only more evidence of her body’s indifference to her feelings, overall, the mysterious mechanics it ran beyond her understanding or knowledge.
◆
“I don’t like it,” said Benji. “I don’t want it.” He poked a finger into the brilliant green mound of asparagus on his plate.
“That’s fine,” said Violet, slicing her own spears into small pieces. “I can eat yours if you don’t want it. I think it’s really yummy.” She lifted her fork to her mouth and chewed with exaggerated movements, as though she were smacking her bubblegum to put on a haughty demeanor. For Benji’s benefit, she hummed in appreciation.
The boy eyed her without reacting. A minute later, as Lisa recounted newly learned facts about Mesopotamia, he placed a small green stalk on his tongue and chewed exploratorily. Slowly, his features twisted on his face like bunched tissue paper; then he spat the bird-food mush back onto his plate. Lisa yelped.
“Benji, you know that’s not okay,” said Violet. She grimaced. “Lisa, calm down.”
The girl whined. “Why doesn’t Benji ever get in trouble?”
“It’s not about trouble,” said Violet. “We all want to have a nice time together, right? So now that Benji knows that spitting makes us unhappy, he won’t do it again. Let it go.” When Lisa still looked put out, Violet changed strategies, listing potential movies to close their evening with.
“Can you pick?” said Lisa. She had recently learned how to have curiosity about Violet and was developing the skill, testing out different kinds of questions as well as new contexts for them. It was interesting to Violet to watch her learn, and moving, although she sometimes felt that one of the benefits of babysitting was the opportunity to maintain a kind of inner privacy.
“I’ll be working on my homework so I can’t watch fully. You guys should choose,” said Violet. The children complained. She insisted she would still be with them on the couch, and mostly paying attention, and eventually they accepted. They moved onto the even more contentious question of what to watch, and bickered as Violet cleared the dishwasher to make room for their soiled plates.
Suddenly, Lisa asked, “Vivi, will you still have homework in college?”
Violet, with a heavy pile of dishes in her hands, turned her head. “Are you kidding? I’ll have more than ever.” She laughed. “But I’ll have more free time to do it, too, so it’s okay.”
“If you have free time can you visit us?” asked Benji, curled up in his plastic dining chair. When Violet smiled at him, he ducked to hide his face.
“I will absolutely visit you guys when I’m home for winter break,” said Violet. The plates clattered unpleasantly as she placed them in the cabinet, and she flinched. “We’ll do something really fun to celebrate, like the aquarium. Oh! We can go to the special show they do at Christmas and Hanukkah.”
“That’s in forever!” said Lisa with a whine. “You have to come visit before then.” She dropped her silverware onto the table and scooched her chair closer to where Violet stood.
“Aw, honey, I’m going to miss you too!” said Violet, reaching over to comb her fingers through the girl’s intricately arranged hair. Earlier in the evening, she’d threaded tiny braids all around the crown of Lisa’s head so they hung like garlands. She felt herself soften: the braids were very pretty. It was true, she would miss Lisa very much.
Benji frowned, his gaze fixed on the plate that now was bare except for three remaining green spears. “I don’t want the rest,” he said. “It’s not yummy.” Violet calmly told him that was fine, but he grumbled, dissatisfied. When she asked what was wrong, he asked in a small voice: “Can you eat it?”
Despite her earlier offer, she’d watched him feast and knew the plate had acquired a glaze of child spit. “I’m sorry Benji,” she said, “I’m not hungry anymore. We can just throw the rest out, it’s no big deal.”
His head stayed low-hung, and his cheeks reddened. He resisted her efforts to draw him out, staying silent or grunting. She asked him what was going on.
“I think he’s sad you’re leaving,” said Lisa. She moistened her pointer finger with her tongue, then pressed it into the crumbs on her plate to escort them back to her mouth.
Violet grasped the seat of Benji’s chair and turned him toward her. She leaned forward with a steep curve in her back to bring them to eye level. “Benji, are you sad I’m going away for college next year?”
His scrunched-up face nodded up and down, and Violet found gentle comedy in the severe expression on his mothwing skin. She put a thumb over the tense furrow in his big babyish forehead, smoothing it out. He batted her hand away, until her playful dance of taps and pokes got him to laugh.
“Aw,” she said, playfully scratching the top of his head. She put an arm around Lisa, too, drawing her close. “I love you guys a lot. We have a long, long time before I leave, so we’ll have a lot of fun together first.”
Lisa pushed Violet’s arm off, initiating a game. “A long, long, longlonglong time!” she yelled gleefully.
Benji joined her: “A long, long, long, long…” The children took turns extending the phrase. Their energy rose until they were jumping up and down, shouting out the word “long” in an endless string, in unison. Violet laughed and sang along to indulge them. After a minute, she asked them to stop. At first politely, and then insistently.
Their voices became abrasive; Violet tried to instill patience in herself, but her feelings rebelled. “Long! Long time!” The sight of crumbs flying out from the corners of their mouths made her uneasy. She stood back up from her chair to signal the end of the game. They followed her around the living room. “Long, long, long…”
She told them in a neutral voice that she needed to use the bathroom, not engaging, and walked to the door as they trailed behind her. As she went inside, still they giggled and pushed, calling out their chorus of “Long! Long, long time!” and tumbling over each other to follow her in. Violet leaned against the bathroom wall as they jumped and crowded her and tugged on her clothing, and the muscles in her throat expanded and contracted, secreting bile. Finally, she had an idea: she pulled her phone out from her pocket. She opened her alarms app, selected the standard ringtone sound, and let it ring at full volume. The children winced.
“Oh, I’m so sorry guys,” she said jaggedly, “I have to take this call.” They were still shaken by the sudden sound, and obliged her as she peeled off. Away from their sticky hands, she turned the corner quickly and ran up the stairs. She scurried into Natasha’s empty home office and shut the door. On the fluffy white pouf in the corner, she folded into herself, scrolling through her phone. She felt weak and hazy. She opened the list of recent calls, and after staring for a moment to identify the number she’d dialed twice last month—on the 23rd and then on the 28th, she remembered—she clicked. What had she been doing? She’d endangered herself, and her future, meaninglessly. The dial ring droned in her ear as she thumped a fist on her knee in agitation.
Then she felt the kick in her belly. The first one.
“Hello, this is the Women’s Center for Health…” said the hoarse, plain-mannered voice, that of an older woman. Violet hung up the phone. There it was again: a movement, undeniable.
She lay back on her cushion and stared at the ceiling. Then she closed her eyes. She chased the feeling as it hurried away like a blur-quick rabbit, frightened back into the burrow.
◆
At school she had continued on totally undetected. During the period of illness, that difficult March, she’d hurried quickly to the auditorium’s single-stall restroom to vomit between periods. Inexplicably, the nausea never interrupted her focus in class; for weeks she sat amiably until the bell rang, at which point a sudden gust of prickling heat and curdling motion struck. Her pale and sweating face was gratefully blurred by the countless peachy faces passing it, and her anxious pace was well-matched by several others. She was never asked after, or confronted by a scrutinizing look.
On her way home one day, she bought a bouquet of lilies from the market, thinking of her English class: Maya Fuller had written her paper on the symbolism of flowers, and had explained in her presentation that they often signified things about femininity and nature. So in the evening she drew herself a warm bath, telling her mother she had bad period cramps so as not to be questioned or disturbed, and filled the tub with the lilies torn from their stems. Perhaps this ritual of sorts, surrounded by blooms, could make her feel the blooming inside her. She was about three months along now, her sides just beginning to widen.
The lights in the bathroom were dimmed low, and a candle flickered on the counter. She stepped into the water slowly. It felt strange to be so bare, yet motionless, to sit still in the tub and do nothing with her nakedness. She had gotten used to sharing her bare body with Darrius, his torso descending quickly on hers in the dark and, in a way, covering her up.
Sex, she had soon discovered, was not an extraordinarily emotional or vulnerable thing for her. There were things she liked about it, and she felt desire, but she also found her desire hard to trace and define. Her thoughts often wandered during the act, but she mostly hid her uncertainties from her partners and tried to perform well. Although she knew this wasn’t quite right, that certain older women like her Health and English teachers might scold her, she felt that she really just needed to keep doing it. She wanted to figure it out, quietly, for herself.
This interest in sex drove her to move forward quickly when she started hooking up with Jack this year. But one side effect of not being officially together was that you didn’t need to end things officially—or respectfully—and he had kind of ghosted her after a month or so. His desire for distance had been solidly communicated by the time she took the pregnancy test, so she never considered telling him. In fact, just below the surface of her awareness she sensed that she liked the detail of his absence, which imparted the feeling that no one had “got” her pregnant, that it was just something that, whatever the consequences, she herself had made happen.
Gazing now at the subtle slope of her stomach, slightly magnified under the still and greenish bathwater, Violet wondered what it looked like inside. The growing life there felt no more real to her than the skeleton inside her, than the confusion of images from biology textbooks that she couldn’t sort through precisely enough to figure out what happened where, or what was visible and what was microscopic. Sinews, platelets, chromosomes, fetal tissue. The unbroken seal of her skin concealed them utterly, like the morning sky pressed back on outer space: no matter how well she understood, intellectually, that the hidden reality was true, beyond that impermeable screen it seemed to belong to the realm of fantasy.
Overwhelmed by her confusion, Violet swallowed air and hunched forward, sinking her head under the water with her eyes screwed shut. A stream of bubbles trailed out from her nose. She felt them brush softly against her skin before floating back to the surface, the pool turning back to dead water.
◆
Since the first appointment she’d skipped, she had made and evaded two more. Last week the call had felt inevitable: she’d caught herself avoiding even the sight of her expanding stomach, flinching when her hands brushed it. She was ready to call it off, all the misery and uncertainty of continuing to care for this odd augmentation of her body. It was at once burdensome and incidental, like a wart on the back of the neck she kept forgetting to excise.
But finally, a whole round of kicks had come—a shock of hope. After standing surrounded, all these months, by foggy windows in rain, in her mind she saw herself finally clearing one spot to transparency with a circular rub of her sleeve; in that vignette of shining glass she saw not the night sky beyond, but the fleeting moment of real feeling, the image that had pushed suddenly into her mind of moving, lively limbs inside her. But in the following stillness the same old fog quickly encroached, covering the scene yet again in pale mist.
Today the clinic had left two messages on her cell phone, urging her to call back to discuss her “health.” The language was appropriately discreet, probably designed to protect those who needed to hide their situation for their safety. Violet played the voicemails in her ear as she sat on the toilet at Natasha’s house, the vents turned on and mostly tuning out the screechy laughs of Benji and Lisa.
She sighed and flushed, pulling on the jeans that had become her habitual costume. They had the cheap elasticity to accommodate the extra two inches at her middle, and she wanted to avoid buying new clothes: she would need a surgical procedure now that she had waited things out into her second trimester, and that would cost more. Almost all of Natasha’s cash payments from the last several months had gone directly to Violet’s underwear drawer, where the pile waited patiently.
Upon exiting the bathroom, Violet was soon winded by Lisa’s charge toward her. Knocked off balance, she put a hand against the wall to steady herself. But Lisa kept her arms tight as a vise around Violet’s waist as she made her own body limp, pulling them both down to the floor with her sinking weight. Only slightly irritated, Violet played along, and they collapsed in a daze of shrieks and giggles. “You attacked me!” said Violet. The effort to keep her voice high and lively made her breathless, as did the girl’s weight on her lap, but she was committed to her role as a guardian and guide: it was wrong to take frustrations out on kids, confusing them. She believed in erasing her private feelings when she was taking care of them, and felt a halo of pride covering her when she returned home from difficult evenings with her sweet, joyful, noisy companions.
“I attacked you!” echoed Lisa, jolting her weight in a manner that took more of Violet’s wind. “I got you so good, you just caved.” Her eyes had the wet, clouded look that came with excessive screen time, and her bubbly laughs were tinged with a loopy mania. Violet turned her head subtly to the side, trying to avoid the path of Lisa’s sugary but sour breath; it had the simultaneously addictive and repulsive quality of certain foul smells, like discarded food that was just beginning to spoil.
The game and wild laughter continued, and Violet played her part. This was right, this was right––Lisa was happy, she felt safe. Her wavering head hovered above Violet, her face locked in beaming laughter and darkened by the lights overhead. Losing herself in her giddy confusion, Lisa was bursting with the unaware trustfulness of children. She knew she could be joyful and free without judgment, and Violet, for her part, had successfully created that feeling by casting a halo of goodness around herself. Yet she thought of how easily she could destroy this abstract, clueless little girl, how one day she could feel a distaste rise up in her like this, uncontrollable, and let it all go. How just once she might reveal, through her own feelings, the violence of life, and say to Lisa plainly: You disgust me. In your need you come too near to me, a pestering mosquito. And Lisa would be crushed, altered forever by the sudden ungrounding.
With Lisa’s face so close to hers, her absentminded adoration radiating from rosy cheeks, Violet felt terrified of that trust, laughing, laughing. She understood she could find herself trapped here forever. Because her occasional aversions to the children were dangerous to them, Violet’s deeply felt devotion corroded the honest discovery of her own feelings, herself. As tension climbed from her throat to the backs of her eyes and tears sprung, she avoided Lisa’s eyes but kept her mouth open in its friendly, doting grin. But she regretted her diligent maintenance of the happy expression when Lisa’s heavy, laughing breaths pushed into Violet’s mouth, a brief but total invasion. She exhaled repeatedly to clear the taste, disgusted.
Without thinking, she brushed the child off her lap and onto the open and empty floor. The motion had no violence, but was rough enough to make a precise thump resound. Lisa protested, but Violet stood up to hurry away with mumbled words.
Her legs had her winding through the house, and the dizzying effect of her adrenaline made the familiar rooms seem labyrinthine. Without clear thoughts in her head, she found herself entering the cluttered cave of the pantry. Her hand reached for the tinted glass bottles on whose curves trembled white crescents of light. One of them was in her hands now, transparent, its contents green, and with her head tilted back it flowed into her mouth. With force and scrunching features, she got the liquid down her throat; as she swallowed, she brought the hand that held the bottle close to her face, her wrist barely muffling the guttural coughs that ensued. Once her breath had steadied she took the last of her drink down, gasped, and settled on the ground with her back against the wine rack.
It’s done now, she thought: I am carrying a mere egg, a seed that will wilt. She could have a little longer, still, but there was no question now of missing the deadline. This thing was never destined to become a mind. With this move, brash but effective, she had made that the conclusive reality.
Violet heard footsteps, too heavy to belong to the children, and in a hurry she pushed herself up. She deduced that Natasha had finished work for the day, and was now emerging from the private realm of her home office. She was queasy from the alcohol, and perhaps even more so from the panic she’d held roiling in her body all day. As she prepared to face Natasha with an innocent facade, she suffered from the promise of yet more anxiety to come.
Natasha walked past the pantry, then faltered, catching Violet’s shadow in the corner of her eye. “Oh, hello,” she said. “You scared me.”
“Just getting a box of mac and cheese to make for the munchkins,” said Violet. Her chest had nervous lightning running through it: the bottle was on the ground next to her feet. The violations of the theft, and of compromising her ability to care responsibly for the children, crowded her mind. Desperately, she wanted to shift to the side so that her calves could cover the bottle from Natasha’s view, but she was terrified of moving and drawing more attention. She stood rigidly still.
Natasha nodded and peered at Violet. Somehow, she felt she was about to be punished, if not for the bottle then for something else. Yet she could not think of anything else she’d done for Natasha to hold against her.
But the older woman’s next words were calm and loving. “You know, you look very womanly these days.” She smiled, her mouth stretched dry and sweet.
“What do you mean?” stammered Violet. How could she not see the bottle? It was right in her line of vision, only barely obscured in the low light.
“I mean you look more adult, more voluptuous. It’s a good thing. You’re growing up.” Her demeanor was mothering as always, but also conspiratorial––as though Violet might be starting to know some of the things that she and her friends, whose experience seemed to carve a path that beckoned Violet to follow step by step, knew. This attitude flattered Violet, but the knowing shine of Natasha’s gaze clashed confusingly with her innocence of the damning bottle in front of her. Violet’s heart slowed, the adrenaline dissipated, but in its place she felt a bud of disappointment sprout. Natasha had seemed to know so much, how to love and how to guide. Yet here she was, picking up on the wrong things in the wrong ways. She almost wanted to grab the bottle and lift it to Natasha’s glinting eyes, to make her see and respond to her misbehavior. Instead she produced her typical meek smile, and soon Natasha left her alone to hide away her evidence.
◆
Violet was required to get an ultrasound at the clinic before the procedure. They expressed surprise when she checked in; they had thought she must be a walk-in, not the girl who was more than four months along. Although her body had certainly undergone significant changes, it still had not taken on the instantly identifiable, strangely proportioned shape of most pregnancies.
Sitting in the waiting room, she felt disappointed in herself, and her mind supplied arguments and insults that didn’t quite make sense. She felt there was a task she hadn’t been up to…above all, fear had won out over curiosity. She did not feel that she’d discovered anything about herself, other than perhaps the depths of her foolishness.
She’d expected to find at least a few other patients when she arrived at the clinic. She had hoped to observe them, to see what she could glean from their anxious or placid faces. But there was no one else in the room: just her and a counsel of empty chairs. She looked at her phone screen to discover a check-in text from Natasha. She’d told her she was feeling very sick, and wouldn’t be able to come by at all this week. Tonight she would tell her parents that she was feeling too woozy to leave her room.
Violet clicked the phone shut without responding. She felt betrayed by Natasha, although the feeling was unfocused. But if she was being petty, she figured she’d have to give herself some grace today.
The state-mandated counseling was largely a bore, involving information she’d already learned from her own research. The young assistant charged with educating her frequently qualified her statements with the refrain: “We have to tell you this.” Violet nodded, sympathetic, and the entire session was like one long knowing look.
The ultrasound technician asked after her feelings and mental state many times, and Violet smiled and mumbled assurances. The technician, also a relatively young woman, insisted that it was Violet’s choice to look at the image on the screen or not: there was no legal requirement that she look, and also no requirement that the image be described.
The squelch of the gel and the gleaming lines of it on her stomach seemed almost obscene.
“You didn’t flinch!” commented the technician. “Isn’t it cold?”
“Not that bad,” said Violet. She watched the apparatus press into her stomach with mild interest. Its long, curly wire resembled landline telephones.
“Most people flinch,” said the technician. “You’re strong.”
To be polite, Violet exhaled air and flattened her lips into a low-effort smile. “I guess.” She looked at the dark screen. Its appearance was like an Etch-a-Sketch, less sophisticated even than pixels. “Um. Is it there yet?”
“Not quite,” said the technician. She began to explain what was happening on the screen, then stopped herself when she remembered Violet had requested to forego the description. Violet watched; like a cloud of ash the shadowy grain swirled, for a moment only forming itself into different kinds of shapelessness. Then the technician said, simply, “It’s there.”
On the screen it flickered: the distinct line of a child’s profile. Constructed of nothing more substantial than a dim light, still there was something like an expression in the innocent swell of its protruding lips, in the upward tilt of its barely-there nose. The small body was still. Cradled snugly in the close cavern of Violet’s womb, its large, bobbing head seemed to nudge curiously at the mysterious black surrounding it. Violet’s own head nodded dizzily toward that wonder as tears announced themselves, first as a blur in her vision, and then as a pleasing warmth on her skin.
The technician asked if she was alright, but despite her penchant for courtesy, Violet felt too enraptured to speak. Soon she felt herself grinning, and the feel of the weight in her stomach shifted. It was like the change of anxious flutters before a performance to the happy ones that came after: the ecstasy and relief of a tricky job not only completed, but done surprisingly well.
Her tears seemed to contain within them every emotion. She felt how deeply she wanted that child someday, and in her mind, she whispered greetings and promises to that future precious son or daughter. And suddenly, she comprehended her error in all this time: she’d insisted upon what she would and would not allow herself to feel. But this thing she’d wanted—experience—could only instruct through shock, uncertainty, uprooting. Now she understood the impossibility of what she had expected from herself, how she had wanted to care about the pregnancy but not about this moment, its end. She was sad. There was a kind of love she had never yet touched, and now she felt it just warming her fingertips.
“Violet,” said the technician, “I’m not sure how you’re feeling.”
She intended to respond, but at each intake of breath she found that her tongue held only more silence.
The technician spoke again. “Does anyone know you’re here, Violet?”
She shook her head. “No, nobody knows.”
“Are you safe?”
“Yes, I’m safe. I just didn’t want to tell anyone,” said Violet. She felt in her expression and her breathing how it seemed she would have more to say. But as the quiet stretched on once again, the technician filled the space.
“Well, Violet, I’m proud of you for making it here.”
Violet asked her to keep the session going, continuing to gaze at the living shape on the screen. The sympathy in the technician’s voice felt a little too close, like her grandmother’s sweaty palm on the back of her neck: overfamiliar. But the words, she admitted, affected her. It really was a major thing she had undergone, and for so many months. She reflected on the efforts she’d made to connect to her body, the care she had taken for herself. The acquiring of the procedure, for which she had scrupulously amassed her babysitting funds. She smiled. It was a tremendous feat, in fact, that she had come so far on her own, without a suspect in her midst despite her steadily growing frame. She wondered if, like Natasha, the others around her had decided that her newly broad and fertile stature suited her.
Now she clasped her hands, and even that small motion held the secret wonder of her body’s intimacy with itself. Noticing the screen anew, she allowed herself to become immersed in her love for the non-infant, for her future child, for her past self. Its head like a just-developed bud, weighing down its stem with new heaviness, continued to nod, up and down. “Look what I made,” she whispered in delight.
“Violet,” said the technician, tentatively. Her voice was like the shyly reaching petals of a night-blooming flower, covert in its beauty. Violet took new notice of her sweetness. The woman worked with a disciplined attention to her patient, and the nervous quiver in her movements announced sincere concern. “May I ask,” she said, “are you having doubts?” At Violet’s long, contemplative look, she paused, as though trying to identify its significance. “Any answer is fine,” she added meaningfully.
Violet’s head shook as if to dislodge something, and she wiped her eyes before smiling at the other young woman. “No, I’m not having doubts,” she said. “I promise.”
“Okay,” the other woman said, “I trust you.” She gave Violet a few more moments to process her thoughts in her inner privacy. Then she spoke again. “I’m sorry to say this, but you’ll have to wait twenty-four hours. But you can come back this time tomorrow, and we can go forward with the procedure if that’s still what you’d like.”
“Very much so,” said Violet, and she heard a new resonance in her voice: as assured as her mother’s when she told a driver where to go, or Natasha’s when she gave her children strict but kind instructions. “I’ll be there.”