At night, I dream that I’m pregnant, my belly sagging like a sack of tarantula eggs, unholy and fat. I’m not superstitious, but I’m not stupid either. I drive to Rite Aid after Kirsh leaves for work. I’ve decided that it’s no longer acceptable for me to terminate a pregnancy. I’m too old, too settled. It’s a decision that hasn’t yet found its way past fear into conviction, but it’s there. Kirsh doesn’t know this, but the baby isn’t his, so it doesn’t matter. I take the test in the Rite Aid bathroom, shaking the stick until the results appear even though the box says not to. I’m not pregnant, but things would make more sense if I were. At home, I’m bland and rude but in bed Kirsh holds me anyway. He is kinder than usual, reaching out in sleep to cup my hip bone in his palm, to cradle my head under the pillow, as if he knows. He curls close to me until morning, squeezing my fingers as if he could squeeze out my disquiet. 

It’s the season of relentless birdsong. The season of open-window nights and unexpected rain that turns to hail and threatens to shatter the skylight. It just might dent the car. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m explaining to an old woman that I cannot see how much money is left in her bank account just because I’ve swiped her debit card when a mother in a linen dress comes into the bookstore. To my co-worker, whose personality is dictated by the conviction that she is too emotionally unhinged to bring a child into this world, this woman is like any other customer, and potentially more of an affront. This woman is pushing what Kirsh and I have come to call a perambulator, a term that arrived in our consciousness from the mouth of a turn-of-the-century detective on TV. This mother’s perambulator is large and ergonomic and better called a stroller. It barely fits down the aisles and I know already that she will not require a bag, no mother with a stroller ever has. 

At this point in my life, it’s gratifying to imagine myself wearing white linen and reading in bed next to a small, damp form that I’ve created. It’s gratifying on levels that verge on horror. Biology is against me these days. I’ve seen this fact play out firsthand with the arrival of my friend’s new baby. The first friend to have a first baby, to cave to the clock. This baby is tiny and wrinkled and all too slowly filling out like a pool toy blown up by breath. He has ravaged his way through her body and still he is the thing my friend loves more than she has ever loved in her life. He is perfect in ways I cannot imagine. Cuter than any newborn ever has been—happy, awake, alert. How alert he is! How calm! It must be the Solfeggio frequencies that played as he was born. It must be the glass of biodynamic wine, the first in nine months, that prompted contractions. It must be the lemon balm, the breastmilk, the organic cotton swaddles, the jade birthing necklace. It must be something I want. 

I tell my co-worker I believe myself to be more of the European persuasion. The occasional glass of wine can only be character defining. An affinity for Bordeaux, an appreciation of tannins, should be fostered from the womb, like language. My baby will have edge and wit and will know that moderation is better than abstinence for everyone involved. I will, of course, draw the line at smoking cigarettes in the nightclub, but I won’t be a Puritan. My co-worker tells me she won’t be a mother at all, and I nod, annoyed at the rehearsal of our personalities.

I go to Ben’s house after work because Kirsh picked up an extra shift. He’s surprised to see me but lets me in. His house is three times the size of my apartment and furnished with blonde wood objects he’s designed himself. They are almost functional. He offers me a glass of wine and I tell him I can’t because I’m pregnant. He hands me a can of sparkling water and then grabs it back so he can open it for me. He asks if the baby is his. I tell him I don’t know. He asks if it could be. “Like, is it even possible? Yes.” I say. He shakes his head. “I want it. If it’s mine, or not.” I nod and sip the sparkling water. I wonder why it’s acceptable to call a baby it? If this baby were real, I might dislike that word choice. “Unfortunately, you’re the other man in this situation,” I say. I’m glad when he laughs. We have sex on his low gray couch and when he comes his face is nuzzled in the crook of my neck and he doesn’t pull out. I stare at the wabi-sabi streaks on his plaster ceiling. 

On TV, the Police Chief is sure the female detective cannot handle the case. She who has no children but could. He does not think she can keep her cool, when accosted by bereaved mothers pushing empty perambulators. She will be overcome. She will lack neutrality. And of this she should not feel bad. It is merely a factor of chromosomes. He will take her off the case, he assures, resting his hand on the small of her back. But she objects. She will stay on the case, or she will tell his wife something he does not want her to hear. His fingers are fat as they drop from her back. 

I wait for the mother in linen but she rarely comes in. There are other mothers in her stead, ones with toddlers that grab art books with grubby hands, ones heavy with pregnancy, their backs braced with support belts. Unlike me, my co-worker goes soft for the old men who come in for the latest Grisham and someone to talk at. She is particularly fond of Harry Varda, who wears bolo ties and tells meandering jokes that were raunchy in the’50s. She likes him because she likes martyrdom, but when I tell her as much she denies it. To me, she acts offended but in his presence her laughter is earnest. Today, he asks if we’ve ever heard the one about Carnation Milk. We have. I duck away under the guise of unboxing shipments in the back room. I don’t have the fortitude to follow his story. He speaks in halting sentences, shaking his head back and forth rhythmically, his words slurpy and potholed with dips in volume. By the end, the punchlines are always lost on me. He must think I’m too dense to get it, or too liberal to laugh. When I come back he says, “So here it is. No tits to pull, no hay to pitch, just stick a hole in the son of a bitch.” He always announces the punchlines. My co-worker laughs and slaps the counter. “You like that one, huh?” He hands her his card. He never pays before the joke has been told.  

I tell Kirsh I’m going out with friends and drive to Ben’s house for dinner. The sun sets right into the kitchen and I stand at the sink, letting it warm my face. Ben is boiling water, condensation filming the windows. He comes up behind me and cups my stomach with his hands. He asks if I’ve made a decision, but I don’t answer. He says he hates the ways of the world but loves thinking of a kid raised right. “My son could be the next Carl Sagan.” In their dreams, men always have brilliant sons. 

Kirsh wants to go to the beach, but we live in a desert. He settles for the hot springs, and we drive hours deep into the very landscape of his petulance. I sit in the passenger seat, staring at the spread of my thighs, periodically unsticking my skin from the leather. I pinch the fat of my lower stomach and Kirsh says stop but I don’t know why and I can’t tell how he noticed. I turn up the music and watch the dirt become pebbled then bouldered then inexplicably forested. “How bizarre,” I say and Kirsh nods. At the hot springs we pay $13 for coconut flavored smoothies and drink them with our torsos bent over the edge of the pool. The concrete compresses my ribs. Tomorrow I will have bruises and they will be yellow and I will love pointing out how easily I am hurt, though I don’t know what that’s indicative of except some misguided concept of fragility that should make me feel feminine and him protective, that should get me coddled but won’t. I take a photo of the smoothie above the water and it reminds me of a beluga but there’s no emoji for that, so when I send it to Ben I send the tooth emoji too, and he asks “brain freeze?” Kirsh wants to know what I’m smiling at. “Baby belugas,” I say, and can hear the Raffi song, and Kirsh sings the line about swimming free, and he wants to see the belugas, but now I’m ready to leave, and when Kirsh holds out my towel, it feels like punishment.  

The detective on TV can’t catch the baby killer. The babies are turning up dead in perambulators, dead in cradles, dead in department store display cases, masquerading as dolls. I am haunted by their small lips in blueberry pouts, their little fists clenched by rigor mortis. “I don’t like this show,” I whine to Kirsh, but we keep watching it anyway, curled on our respective sides of the couch. I study his face for any indication of distress but he is unphased by the baby parade, morbid or animate. I show him a photo of my friend’s baby wearing a crocheted balaclava and he says, “What a stupid hat.” 

When the mother comes into the store again she is not wearing linen, but Birkenstocks that are too big for her feet and a sweatshirt with banana crusted on the sleeve. I can smell it as she hands me her card. This time she walks slowly past the shelves with her stroller for only a few minutes before the baby starts making tiny huffs and thrusting his fist in the air. This time she only buys a small board book with an otter finger-puppet protruding cheerfully from its center. “It’s cute,” I say. “The book or the kid?” She laughs and sets the book on the baby’s stomach. His hands fumble with it and he looks constipated. “He’s pooping,” she confirms, and I’m reminded that I do not have what she has. I have the dignity and time to not care about bowel habits. I smile and return her card with two fingers. 

Ben has decided I should take a paternity test if I can’t make the choice for myself. He says it as if the decision is as obvious as the slate countertop beneath his fingertips. I think of Kirsh, of his college ex who is newly pregnant, of his joke that he dodged a bullet. He is brusque when I swoon. His own defense mechanism, I tell myself, though maybe I’m reading into it. Ben says my name. He says, “answer me.” And I want to but instead I tell him I have to go. 

I call my friend with the baby and she says “wait” four times before saying “hello?” I ask how life’s treating her and she laughs. She says, “Treating?” And I can hear how the sweetness of that word tastes wrong in her mouth. “Treat!” Her baby yells, and she groans. I’m surprised he can talk. “Of course he can talk,” she says. “He’s 18 months.” And I nod like I know, like she can see me. I’m lying in the bathtub with a glass of wine, arching my back slowly up and down to make my stomach crest like an upturned cereal bowl. I can only extend so far before gravity displaces the water and my body becomes a thing too heavy for its own muscles. From this angle my legs look gangly and colorless, my knees knocking at the far end of the bath, dwarfed by the artificial distension of my belly. The contortion makes me lightheaded. I listen to my friend. She’s made a poultice from her garden to treat her mastitis. She’s met a mother who also likes craft IPAs. She’s told her husband that vasectomies are reversible. I let my back sink down onto the hard porcelain, which itself is cold despite the water’s heat, and watch my belly deflate. I scrunch my face as if about to cry, but I don’t. 

I’m at work when my period comes, and I have to borrow a tampon from my co-worker. I’ve been pretending I no longer need them. I sit on the toilet and study my palm against a grainy diagram of life lines and heart lines. The longer the better, the article states, as if more is the solace I’m craving. More vitality, more love, more intelligence. I flex my palm as the article says to, watching the lines extend, the blood pulse in the center, confused at the unnatural constriction of space. I try to decide if my lines are long enough, if the way I clenched my fists in the womb has writ my life large, inscribing my skin with tributaries I could follow if only I knew how to read maps. When I come out, Harry Varda is at the register, my co-worker leaning on the counter. I walk up and hear him ask if she’s ever heard the one about Carnation Milk. “We have,” I say, but he ignores me. For the first time, the joke makes me sad. I am stuck thinking about the hay. The hay that doesn’t need pitching. The life that doesn’t need cultivating, that is shelf-stable and condensed. “We know how this one ends,” I say again, but my co-worker rolls her eyes and says, “No, we don’t. I don’t remember.”