GRENDEL’S MOTHER by Katherine Heiny
Dr. Andy beamed up at Maya from between the stirrups and said, “Everything looks great!”
Maya wasn’t sure whether this was a medical observation or a compliment of some kind, so she only said, “Mmmm,” diplomatically. She was twelve weeks pregnant.
Dr. Andy finished the exam and stood up. “You’re doing so well!” he said. He was only in his late-twenties, very sincere, and relentlessly cheerful.
His upbeat attitude, combined with the fact that everyone called him “Dr. Andy” instead of “Dr. Lewiston,” reminded Maya of a preschool teacher. She liked this about him. She literally could not picture him giving her bad news, and because she could not imagine it, she felt it wouldn’t happen. (But Maya’s previous doctor, who’d retired last year, had always had her leave her underwear on until just before the exam, when he’d remove it. He said this was so Maya would feel more comfortable, but she’d always suspected he just liked slipping off girls’ panties. So she hadn’t been what you might call especially fortunate in ob/gyn choices.)
Now Dr. Andy said to his nurse, “You can call in her partner for the ultrasound.”
The nurse was an older, capable-looking woman, and Maya assumed she actually ran the whole practice, and might even be Dr. Andy’s mother. The nurse left the exam room and returned with Rhodes a moment later.
Dr. Andy shook his hand. “So nice to meet Maya’s partner!”
“We’re married,” Maya said from the exam table.
“Maya’s husband then,” Dr. Andy said heartily.
“We don’t have rings anymore,” Rhodes said, “because Maya turned out to be allergic to hers and had to have the fire department cut it off the day after the wedding, and I left mine on the nightstand at an old girlfriend’s house.”
Dr. Andy laughed, but Maya knew he laughed at everything. “That’s a joke about the old girlfriend,” she said for the nurse’s benefit. “His ring actually fell off in the Pacific Ocean on our honeymoon.”
“Luckily we’re not big believers in foreshadowing,” Rhodes said. “Although you’ll notice we haven’t replaced them. We’re sort of waiting to see how things pan out.”
Maya sighed. There were reasons – good ones – that she hadn’t brought Rhodes with her before.
The nurse put a dollop of astoundingly cold gel on Maya’s stomach and smeared it around. Then Dr. Andy ran the ultrasound probe over the gel, and after a moment, he turned the screen of the ultrasound machine so they all could see it.
Maya had friends whose doctors had 3D colored ultrasound machines, but evidently Dr. Andy was still saving up for one of those. The image on the screen old-fashioned and grainy, black-and-white. But there was her baby, or fetus she supposed, floating in the darkness.
“The baby’s back is to us,” Dr. Andy explained. “You can see the nice straight spine and the head, and there is the heart beating.”
She and Rhodes both stared at that little fluttering of heartbeat. It reminded Maya of a butterfly.
Rhodes squeezed her hand. “Who’d have thought a spontaneous moment on my parents’ couch after a bottle of tequila would lead to this?”
Dr. Andy laughed. Maya glanced at the nurse and found her frowning back harshly. “He’s an acquired taste,” Maya said.
It wasn’t true, what Rhodes said about the conception of their baby. Or rather, the spontaneous part wasn’t true, because they’d been trying to get pregnant for six months. Unfortunately, the couch and the tequila were accurate.
* * *
After the doctor’s appointment, they drove over to Rhodes’s parents’ house to tell them the news, now that Maya was officially past the first trimester.
“Oh my God!” Rhodes’s mother, Hazelene, shrieked. “I’m so happy! I’m happier than you are!”
Rhodes’s father opened a bottle of champagne, and they all sat in the living room and drank it. Although instead of champagne Maya had milk, which turned out to be the only non-alcoholic, decaffeinated beverage in the house.
“Have you thought about names?” Hazelene asked. She did seem excited, and kept bouncing up and down slightly on her chair cushion.
“What names do you like, Mom?” Rhodes asked. “And whatever you answer, we’ll say ‘Not that.’ ”
“I’ve always liked Thor for a boy,” Hazelene said. “And Grendel for a girl.”
“That so proves my point,” Rhodes said.
Just then Magellan, Rhodes’s eighteen-year-old sister, and her boyfriend Toby arrived.
Hazelene popped out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box. “Maya and Rhodes are going to have a baby!”
Magellan looked at Maya for confirmation, as though Hazelene said this sort of thing all the time, whether it was true or not. Maya nodded.
“Cool,” said Magellan. She was dark-haired and stocky, with none of Rhodes’s tall skinny grace. “Congratulations.”
Toby didn’t say anything, but he never said anything. He wore his iPod constantly, the little white buds tucked into his ears every single second Maya had ever been in his presence. He was a tall, scrawny boy with long, blonde hair that he constantly flicked out of his eyes by jerking his head slightly.
He accepted the glass of champagne Rhodes’s father handed him, and raised it when they all made a toast.
“Does he even know what he’s drinking to?” Rhodes asked Magellan, and she gave an impatient nod like Rhodes was an idiot for asking.
Toby and Magellan seemed to Maya not so much a couple as animal and trainer, Toby being the animal. Like Clever Hans and his owner, or Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat, although Toby was not as interesting (or probably as intelligent) as Curious George.
Rhodes’s parents never objected to Toby’s constant iPod-wearing, or the fact that he always asked (through Magellan) what they were having before he agreed to stay for dinner. Maya didn’t know whether they accepted this antisocial behavior because they thought Toby was probably the best that Magellan could do, or because they had failed to notice it. They could be kind of clueless sometimes.
“To Grendel!” Hazelene cried out happily, raising her glass again. Maya thought maybe so much champagne before dinner was not a good idea.
“Or Thor,” added Rhodes’s father.
Toby flicked his bangs out his eyes, and Magellan said, “Why are we talking about Beowulf?”
Yes, Maya had voluntarily married into this family, had, in fact, chosen one of its members to father her child, was willingly about to partake of its gene pool. (It seemed to Maya that each of those phrases should be followed by an exclamation point – family! child! gene pool!) She knew Rhodes would look at this from an evolutionary perspective, and say that Maya was seeking some trait which neither she nor her family possessed. But most of the time Maya just thought she had taken complete leave of her senses.
* * *
Hazelene phoned a few days later and said, “Hello Maya, dear. Are you and Grendel busy this morning?”
Everyone was calling Maya’s unborn baby Grendel now. Maya tried very hard to believe this was an in utero name only, and that the baby would grow up being called by whatever name she and Rhodes decided to give it, but she had some doubts. She knew early nicknames could stick.
“No, I’m not doing anything right now,” Maya said. (She only worked at the library two days a week.) She understood, and was pleased, that Hazelene was tremendously excited about her first grandchild but she refused to act as though Grendel had a separate social life until Grendel actually did.
“I was wondering if you might stop by,” Hazelene said. “It seems that Magellan and Toby have had a small misunderstanding – ”
“He broke up with me,” Magellan said forcefully in the background.
“And we’re in a bit of crisis and could use your wisdom,” Hazelene finished.
“Okay, I’ll be right over,” Maya said.
She was actually flattered to have been invited. She felt like a head of state summoned to an international summit on terrorism. Although when she arrived at Rhodes’s parents’ house half an hour later, she found it somewhat disappointing as international summits go. It consisted solely of Magellan slumped at the kitchen table, staring morosely into a bowl of raisin bran while Hazelene sat across from her, reading the newspaper and wondering aloud why the farmers’ market had been moved from Wednesday to Tuesday.
Maya pulled up a chair and opened the bottle of orange juice she’d brought with her. “So what happened? Why did you break up?” she asked in attempt to get things started.
A small beat of silence followed, during which Maya wondered if the answer to that question was something Hazelene was prepared to hear. What if Magellan started talking about blow jobs?
But all Magellan did was push her cereal bowl away and cover her face with her hands. “I don’t know!” she said hoarsely. “He won’t tell me! All he did is say it’s over and now he won’t answer his phone or anything!”
“I’m sure there was a reason, dear,” Hazelene said gently.
Maya said nothing at all because, quite unexpectedly, her heart had constricted with sympathy to the point where speech was impossible.
Because, really, was there any breakup more painful that an unexplained one? Certainly, Hazelene was right and there was a reason, but unless Toby chose to tell Magellan, she would never know what it was. It could be that Toby had started seeing some other girl. It could be that Toby had been seeing some other girl for the whole time he had been seeing Magellan. It could be that Toby had met some girl so bewitching, so superior to Magellan in every way, that just the knowledge of her existence made Toby not want to be with Magellan anymore. It could be that Toby was gay, or bisexual, or had decided to become a priest. It could be that his parents disapproved of Magellan. It could be that his friends disapproved of Magellan. It could be some personal detail about Magellan, like Toby thought she wasn’t smart enough or social enough or funny enough. It could be, hideously, some personal physical detail about Magellan, like that he thought her stomach was wobbly or she didn’t clean her fingernails well or her hair smelled funny. It could be something Magellan had said, which Toby had taken the wrong way, like her dismissing the Arctic Monkeys’ talent, or a joke about iPods which didn’t go over that well. It could be anything, and that was the most maddening part of all. And Maya knew, from personal experience, that the reason behind the breakup could become, in a way, even more anguishing than the breakup itself, if you never found out what it was. It could haunt you for months, even for years, the unknown reason, and take on a nearly mythical importance, until you forgot, or almost forgot, that the truly important thing was that someone you wanted to be with no longer wanted to be with you.
* * *
The next night Rhodes rubbed Maya’s back as they lay in bed. The pregnancy was making it ache. Rhodes gave very good back rubs and Maya made a low, appreciative sound.
“On any given day, would you rather have sex or a back rub?” Rhodes asked.
“Both,” Maya said sleepily.
“What, half-and-half?” Rhodes asked. “Or is this some sort of two-man fantasy and if so, which man do I get to be?”
Before she could answer, the phone rang. Rhodes picked it up and said, “Hello?” and then he said “Ye-es” in that wary, speculative way he did when it was a telemarketer. Then he went quiet for so long that Maya thought it must not be a telemarketer, unless it was one selling something Rhodes might actually be interested in, like blue laser pointers.
Finally, he said, “Let me talk it over with Maya and I’ll call you back.” He hung up. “That was Magellan. She wants to move in with us for awhile.”
“Why?”
Rhodes began rubbing her back again. “Apparently my parents are driving her crazy about her big breakup. My mom wants them to take a pottery course together and my dad keeps, like, speaking to inanimate objects and then saying, ‘Sorry, I thought that was Toby for a minute.’ ” Rhodes laughed, and Maya was glad he had not laughed on the phone. “Don’t worry, I’ll call her back in five minutes and tell her no.”
“I don’t mind if she stays with us,” Maya said. “For a little while.”
Rhodes stopped rubbing. “Really?”
“Really,” Maya said.
“Why?”
“I feel bad for her,” Maya said. But the truth was not as simple as that. The truth was that Brad Redington had broken up with Maya the day after senior prom, after dating her for six months, and never given her a single reason for the breakup, and apparently Maya was such a rigid, narrow person that she could only have sympathy for someone if she had endured an almost identical misfortune.
“Well, okay,” Rhodes said.
He picked up the phone and dialed. Magellan must have answered because Rhodes said immediately, “Okay, as long as you move out before the baby’s born and hopefully a whole lot sooner.”
* * *
Maya had failed to foresee certain things, or to be honest, forgotten all about them, when she agreed to have Magellan come live with them. She had forgotten that they’d given the bed in the spare room to the Salvation Army to make room for the baby furniture, which meant Magellan would have to sleep on the living room couch. Magellan didn’t object to this, but she seemed to consider the living room her personal domain and within hours of her arrival, it looked like a family of vagrants (a very modern family with lots of electronics) had moved in with all their earthly goods.
Maya had also forgotten how messy teenagers were, how they left their clothes on the floor, and their towels on the chairs, and their hairs in the sink, and their half-filled coffee cups and diet Coke cans on every possible surface. And Magellan seemed to eat trail mix more or less constantly, leaving a grit on the floor to crunch under Maya’s bare feet.
Maya had forgotten that it was the first week of summer vacation, and Magellan didn’t have a summer job (or very much desire to get one, apparently) so she was around the house all the time. And since Maya worked at home three days a week, that meant a lot of together time. Which led to another thing Maya had forgotten, namely that she didn’t really like Magellan very much.
She had not remembered that Magellan, for the most part, was silent, and sullen, and lazy, or the fact that when she did talk, her stories had no discernible end, and just trailed off aimlessly, driving Maya berserk. And she had forgotten that Magellan judged her all the time. When Maya brought in groceries, Magellan looked them over skeptically but did not offer to help unpack. If Maya took a nap in the afternoon, Magellan raised her eyebrows – Magellan who did nothing but sit on the couch and stare at the TV all day! Magellan watched the way Maya moved and ate and dressed and showered and kept her house and talked to Rhodes, and she had opinions on it all, Maya knew, because Maya remembered being a teenager; oh, that, Maya remembered.
By the fourth night of Magellan’s stay, Maya and Rhodes had taken to going to bed, or at least to their bedroom, at eight o’clock. “She’s going to think we’re such losers,” Maya said.
“Then go out and talk to her if you don’t want her to think that,” Rhodes said. He was sitting in bed with his laptop. Suddenly he banged the keyboard. “And she’s been using my laptop to download music from illegal websites, and now I have a webserver using our bandwidth to serve up Japanese cartoon porn.”
Maya went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Nowhere in the house was Magellan’s presence more obvious. Every inch of available countertop in the bathroom was now covered with miniature bottles of cosmetics and perfumes and lotions. Maya was both fascinated and depressed by this collection. How many trips to the store would it have taken to accumulate all these free samples? And yet Magellan didn’t realize that her looks were not the problem. Her looks were actually fine, or potentially fine, if she had the personality to make you forget them. All these little tubes of things weren’t the answer. For the first time, Maya hoped that Grendel would be a boy. Girls were nothing but heartbreak.
* * *
Maya craved the chicken tenders from Bennigan’s, and so she and Rhodes began to go there for dinner once or twice a week. It was also a good way to escape Magellan, who said she didn’t want to be seen there with them, no offense.
Tonight they were waiting to be seated and a woman in front of them in line turned around and said, “Rhodes?”
Maya had no idea who this woman was, but obviously Rhodes did, because he completely lost the thread of something he was saying about grid engines and stared at her.
The woman smiled and touched the arm of the man next to her, who also turned around. “This is my husband Jeff,” she said. “Jeff, this is Rhodes Hollenbeck, and . . .”
“This is my wife, Maya,” Rhodes said. “She’s pregnant.”
“That’s not why we got married, though,” Maya added. She meant it sardonically, but Jeff just nodded and said, “Oh, right.”
“This is Kimmy Brinkman,” Rhodes finally said, and Maya could only think Kimmy Brinkman! Only not so much the words as a general kind of thrilled eagerness, the way she might feel if someone told her she had won a trip to the Caribbean.
Just then the hostess came up and said, “Table for four?”
Kimmy Brinkman said, “Sure, that would be great,” and they all went and sat in a booth together and the whole time Maya kept thinking Kimmy Brinkman! in the same, excited way.
This was Kimmy Brinkman! This woman with the short blonde hair and the small nose and the blue cardigan. This was Kimmy Brinkman, for whom Rhodes had pined all of his junior year of high school while she dated a senior. Kimmy Brinkman, who had finally consented to date Rhodes when the senior went to college. Kimmy Brinkman, to whom Rhodes had lost his virginity in the storage space next to his parents’ kitchen while Hazelene chalked the shopping list on the blackboard ten yards away. Kimmy Brinkman, who had performed oral sex on Rhodes in the special education playground late at night (the only place they could think to go where no one would look for them). Kimmy Brinkman, who had gone on summer vacation with Rhodes’s family and not been allowed to share a bedroom. Kimmy Brinkman, who had taken Rhodes on summer vacation with her family and they had been allowed to share a bedroom, but hadn’t had sex because Rhodes had been fearful of Kimmy’s father storming the room in his underwear with a shotgun, even though her father was apparently very mild-mannered.
Oh, the things Maya knew about Kimmy Brinkman and here she was having dinner with her! It seemed as improbable as having dinner with Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill. Well, maybe a bit more probable, given that Kimmy was a) alive and b) living in the next town over, where she was a partner in a dermatology practice and her husband Jeff owned a dog-grooming business.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t any way, or at least any way Maya could see, to discuss the things she knew about Kimmy Brinkman. So instead they had to talk about Maya’s due date, and whether February is a good or bad time to have a birthday, and why Rhodes hadn’t gone to his high school reunion, and how the economic crisis was affecting the dog-grooming industry. Eventually, Maya stopped thinking Kimmy Brinkman! every few seconds and started thinking about chicken tenders in the same way, which was what she’d been doing in the first place.
In the car on the way home, she said, “I can’t believe I finally met Kimmy Brinkman.”
“And she was awful!” Rhodes said with unexpected heat.
“Really?” Maya said. “I didn’t think so. She told me I should do the exact same thing to my skin every single night.”
“You don’t understand,” Rhodes said. “I used to look at her in Advanced Algebra and some days I thought the school could literally collapse and kill us and I would die happy because Kimmy Brinkman loved me. And now she’s a dermatologist married to a dog groomer and she only reads books from Oprah’s Book Club!”
Maya wanted to argue that being a dermatologist was a totally respectable occupation, but she had to agree with him about the dog groomer and certainly about Oprah’s Book Club. So instead she said mildly, “You just drove past our turn.”
“Sorry,” Rhodes said, checking the mirror and getting ready to do a u-turn. “I just can’t get over how awful she is.”
Maya thought perhaps she should be jealous that Rhodes had once felt that way about Kimmy Brinkman, because she was pretty sure he’d never felt that way about her, but she wasn’t. She also thought that maybe it would have been nice to meet Kimmy Brinkman when she, Maya, wasn’t wearing pants that looked an inch too short because of her expanding stomach, but she didn’t really mind about that either. Mainly she just thought that she and Rhodes were different. That Rhodes would, apparently, still like to feel the way he had in high school, and Maya couldn’t think of anything worse.
* * *
Maya drove Magellan over to Rhodes’s parents’ house so she could collect a few things. (Just a few,” Rhodes emphasized before they left.) And while Magellan was busy up in her room, Hazelene said, “I have something to show you,” and led Maya to her bedroom.
Hazelene took a fabric hatbox off the top shelf of her closet. “I didn’t save very many baby things,” she said. “But I thought I’d show you what I have.”
She dumped the contents of the hatbox out unceremoniously on the bed and started picking through them.
“This is a little sweater and cap that my mother knitted and all of my babies wore home from the hospital,” she said, smoothing out a tiny white cardigan and matching hat with tassels. “Though only Rhodes’s head was small enough to wear the cap.”
This sounded vaguely insulting toward Rhodes, like maybe he was less intelligent than the rest of his family. But Maya liked the little sweater and cap. “I’d love to have those,” she said.
“And here are two maternity tops,” Hazelene said, shaking them both out and spreading them on the bed. “I can’t really remember why I saved these two. They must look ugly by today’s standards.”
They did indeed. One was especially hideous, bright green with big white polka dots. The other was a beige, cotton tunic with colorful embroidery around the neckline, and was sort of okay, or would be if Maya were Swedish and wore flowers in her hair.
“Oh, they’re not ugly,” Maya said. “Now they’re considered retro or vintage.”
She could tell by Hazelene’s expression that neither of those words meant anything and she might as well have said “corbomite” and “horta.” Although those were Star Trek terms and Hazelene may easily have understood them because Rhodes had been a big fan of Star Trek as a preteen and once in an attempt at mother-son bonding, he and Hazelene had gone to a convention in Chicago . . . Maya shook her head. It really didn’t bear thinking about.
Instead she looked at the other items which had fallen out of the hatbox. There were some yellowed envelopes which Maya assumed contained copies of birth announcements, and a few silver spoons, and several tiny, vinyl hospital identification bracelets. Maya picked one of the bracelets up and smoothed it out to see if it was Rhodes’s. But the name on the bracelet read Pascal Livingston Hollenbeck.
Maya looked at Hazelene. “You had a baby named Pascal?”
“Is that his bracelet?” Hazelene asked. She took it from Maya gently. “Yes, I did, but he died when he was just a day old. They said he had a bacterial infection.”
“Oh, Hazelene,” Maya breathed. “How – how unbearable.”
“It was not an easy time,” Hazelene sounded matter-of-fact. “But a year later we had Rhodes and then things were okay.”
“I’ve never seen his grave,” Maya said softly. She had been to the cemetery with Rhodes’s family when his grandmother died.
“He’s buried in Delaware, where we lived then,” Hazelene said. “I’ve never been back to see his grave actually. I hope sometimes that they take good care of it, but they do, generally, at cemeteries, keep all the graves tidy, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yes,” Maya said automatically.
She was often surprised by information, things other people seemed to know. She never knew until last month that you had to have your boiler serviced, and yet virtually every other person who owned a house must know that. And it was only this year, during a conversation about jetlag, that she learned the Earth spun from west to east. She had known, of course, that the Earth rotated, but she had never wondered – never considered! never thought about it! – which direction. And she had not known until now, this very minute, that you could carry a baby for nine months, give birth to it, watch it die, leave its body buried in a distant state and hope that strangers tended its grave – that you could do all that and not stagger around for the rest of your life with a gaping wound in your middle. You could live through that and thirty years later you could be a functional, basically cheerful person anticipating the birth of your first grandchild. This knowledge swept through Maya with such force that she had to close her eyes for a second.
When she opened her eyes, she knew she ought to hug Hazelene, but curiously, Hazelene did not seem to need hugging, and was busy stuffing everything back into the hatbox.
“Wait,” Maya said. “I want the maternity tops, too.” She vowed that she would wear them both, even the one with polka dots.
* * *
The next time they went to Bennigan’s, as the hostess led them to a table, they turned a corner and there sitting in a booth was Dr. Andy.
He glanced up. “Why, Maya, hello.”
Apparently there was a whole social life to be had at Bennigan’s and Maya had never been aware of it. She wished she still wasn’t aware of it. She thought maybe Magellan was right about not wanting to come here.
Maya hoped it would not turn out that Dr. Andy was eating alone. She peered into the other side of the booth, and was happy to see a nice-looking Hispanic woman sitting opposite him.
“Hi, Dr. Andy,” Maya said. “You remember my husband, Rhodes.”
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Andy said. “And this is . . . Patricia.”
Patricia smiled at them, somewhat wanly it seemed to Maya, and Rhodes said, “I see you have an iPhone. What’s your opinion on their firmware?”
But Maya was thinking about the way Dr. Andy had introduced Patricia. Why hadn’t he said my girlfriend or even my friend? Why did Patricia look so uncomfortable? Why did Dr. Andy seem subdued? Why were they both picking at an order of nachos and nursing watery margaritas? Oh God, were they breaking up – here and now? Were there any fates worse than breaking up at Bennigan’s over nachos? (Yes, yes, of course there were. Think of all the Filipinos being kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf! But in a way there weren’t.)
Eventually the hostess cleared her throat, and Maya and Rhodes continued on to their own table, but Maya could barely concentrate. She was thinking about how when she was trying to get pregnant, it seemed like the rest of the world was having babies with the greatest of ease, and of how, when she was younger, it seemed like everyone she knew was in long-term relationships while Maya was still sleeping with men who didn’t always call her again. And how eventually, you got what you wanted – lover, husband, baby – and you still remembered that you had once felt lonely and bereft and incomplete, but you forgot that other people went on feeling that way. You forgot that some people never got what they wanted, or got it and managed to keep it only briefly. You forgot about all that love out in the world, with no place to go. It seemed to Maya that Bennigan’s was full of that sad, superfluous love tonight, a dark, pulsing cloud of it, pushing in on her from all sides –
“What’s wrong?” Rhodes asked. He reached across the table and held her hand.
Maya blinked back tears. “Nothing,” she whispered. “Just hormones.”
How could she and Rhodes bring a baby into such a world? What were they thinking?
* * *
Maya got so sleepy one afternoon at the library that she actually dozed off at the Interlibrary Loan Desk with her head on her hand. Her boss told her to take the rest of the day off, so Maya went home.
She was pleased to find that Magellan had actually gone out somewhere, and she walked past the living room, unbuttoning her blouse. She intended to sleep the afternoon away.
When she opened her bedroom door, her first reaction was one of annoyance that Magellan’s stuff was now in here, too – her clothes on the floor, and her flip-flops bunching up the throw rug. But then Maya realized, with something like horror, that not only was Magellan’s stuff in here, but Magellan was, too, in the bed, under the covers, writhing around with someone.
Maya’s pretty, white comforter was thrown back and Toby’s head appeared. Magellan was beneath him, and it was obvious that the reason they hadn’t heard Maya was that they were both wearing headphones connected to Toby’s iPod, which rested on Maya’s own pillow, its screen flashing.
Toby tossed his head to clear his bangs, and at that moment, he saw Maya. “Oh, shit,” he said distinctly. (He spoke! He spoke! Any other time, Maya would have been thrilled.)
Magellan opened her eyes then and saw Maya, too. She made an inarticulate noise, which sounded just like Maya’s mother’s cat last Christmas, when it ate tinsel off the tree and threw up in the coat closet.
Maya stepped back and banged the door closed. She stood on the other side of it, panting with panic, and re-buttoned her blouse crookedly. Then she hurried back out to her car and drove to Rhodes’s office.
* * *
“My first question – ” Rhodes began.
“Missionary,” Maya answered. “Very basic from what I could see.”
“I was actually wondering where he got the splitter for the iPod headphones,” Rhodes said.
“Well, was your second question going to be what position?” Maya said, exasperated.
Rhodes leaned back in his office chair. “No, my second question is how will we know when it’s safe to go home?”
Maya groaned. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
In the end, they went to Starbucks for an hour and afterward drove around aimlessly for twenty minutes. Then they went home and Maya rang their own doorbell. When nobody answered, they went inside.
Magellan was gone. Not just out, but gone. Gone too were her laptop, her phone charger, her web cam, her headphones, her novels, her notebooks, her pens and pencils, her fluffy green bathrobe, her spill-proof coffee mug, her flip-flops, her reading light, her bags of trail mix and her endless cans of diet coke, her pop-up laundry hamper, her hair dryer, her plastic hangers, her tangle of necklaces and her dangly earrings, her bras, her underpants, her skirts, her shirts, her jeans, her socks, her baby powder, her combs, her brushes, her eye shadow, lipsticks, tampons, hand mirror, and tweezers. All vanished from the living room floor and furniture.
“I can see the couch again!” Rhodes said happily. “She’s moved out!”
But Maya – though pleased to have her living room back – felt happy not for herself and Rhodes, but for Magellan. What must have it felt like to kiss Toby, to touch him, to hold him, to undress him (or watch him undress, however they did it) after thinking for so long that she would never get to do those things again? Magellan, no matter how embarrassed, must have a light heart tonight, and Maya’s own heart rose in accord.
Later when she went into the bathroom, she saw that Magellan, either through oversight or time constraints, had not taken her dozens of little sample-size bottles and tubes. Maya swept them all into a pretty, cut-glass bowl and put the bowl on top of the toilet tank as a sort of alternative potpourri. She stirred the little plastic vials with a finger. She felt an inexplicable fondness for them now, and an equally inexplicable sadness that Magellan was gone.
* * *
When Maya went in for her sixteen-week check-up, Dr. Andy was wearing a blue-and-white seersucker suit and a straw boater with a blue hatband. He looked a little crazy, but also jolly and carefree, and Maya liked that, because she desperately wanted to believe that having a baby could be a jolly, carefree experience.
Dr. Andy examined Maya (she could see the top of the boater the whole time) and then had the nurse call Rhodes in for the ultrasound.
“Wow,” Rhodes said when he saw Dr. Andy. “That’s quite an outfit.”
“Thank you,” Dr. Andy said in a pleased-sounding way. Maya wondered if it was possible to offend him, and figured Rhodes would probably find a way before the baby was born.
“You and Maya are a matched set,” Rhodes said, which did offend Maya. She was wearing Hazelene’s green, polka-dot maternity top, and if anything, it looked even worse on than it had spread out on the bed.
She and Dr. Andy regarded each other, but evidently he didn’t know quite what to say either, because after a moment, he said, “Let’s do the ultrasound, shall we?”
This time, they could see Grendel’s profile, and watch him or her stretching and rotating, the mouth opening, closing, and swallowing. At one point Grendel kicked in the direction of the ultrasound probe, and Dr. Andy laughed. “Very responsive for this age,” he said.
Was it possible to feel a vain, superior, soccer-mom kind of pride in a sixteen-week-old fetus? Yes, Maya was sorry to realize it was, and that she was indeed feeling it. She was sad when the ultrasound was over.
After the appointment, Maya and Rhodes had to wait a long time for the elevator, which was always very slow. Maya thought it was because there were mainly doctors’ offices in the building, and lots of old people shuffling on and off the elevator at every floor. Rhodes waited impatiently, pressing the call button about ten times and picking petals off the dried flower arrangement on the table. He could never hold still for long.
“Does it bother you, ever,” Maya said thoughtfully, “that he’s so young?”
“Babies are supposed to be young,” Rhodes said.
“Not Grendel.” Maya was patient. “Dr. Andy.”
“Oh.” Rhodes considered. “No, not really,” he said at last. “He seems to know what he’s doing, and you and I know what we’re doing, so I think we’ll be okay.”
Maya wished then that the elevator would take even longer to arrive than it normally did because she wanted to savor this moment. She knew that lots of couples achieved this before they were married, let alone before they were expecting their first child, and she also knew that many couples experienced this as a continuous state and not a random occurrence, but she didn’t really care. She and Rhodes, for once, felt exactly the same way.
Katherine Heiny’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Seneca Review, The Nebraska Review, Confrontation, Seventeen, and have been presented on Selected Shorts on NPR.