Love Stories in This Town

I recognize the look in his eyes.

“Go home,” I tell him. “Can’t you just go home?” And something changes in his face. His eyes fill up with tears.

Rosie comes through the door. She has been fixing her hair and she smells like Aqua Net and a new dose of perfume. Her mouth opens wide, and she grabs me. The man (dick completely soft by this time, and swinging wildly) pushes us to the ground and heads for the door. Old Ralph tackles him downstairs, and when the cops arrive, the masturbator is tied to the card catalog with packing tape.

It turns out that the masturbator has a name: Neil Davidson. He lives in Helena with his wife and two kids. He’s a mortgage broker. His picture is on the front page of the Friday paper, along with my name and the name of our library. It is an old picture: his hair is thick, and he wears a tie. His smile is full of hope.

“What a sick, sick man,” says my mother, looking at the paper over my shoulder. Her hair is still pinned in curls, and she has given me my toast with honey. She is rotting from the inside, I can smell it.

“You got that right,” calls my father from the living room. His oxygen tube almost drowns out the television. I can see my father’s face, and it is gray and resentful.

I don’t say anything, but I know they are wrong. I saw Neil Davidson in the flesh. I knew the look in his eyes. I wish my parents would just be quiet. I will call James today, and I will give him back his ring. “Please understand, James,” I will say. And then I will tell him what I should have told the masturbator: There are plenty of things worse than having a home, and doing what you have to do to stay there.

The Stars Are Bright in Texas (#ulink_88c62c26-ebff-59fd-af3f-963f481884a8)

They told us the baby was dead, and two days later we were on a plane to Texas. We were moving, and had to buy a house. We’d always rented, and all our furniture was from Goodwill. We’d never had a realtor before. We were going to be rich.

In my carry-on bag, I had three magazines, an apple, and two bottles of prescription pills: an antibiotic and a painkiller. I swallowed one pill from each bottle as we taxied down the runway, leaving Bloomington, and my dead baby, behind.

It hadn’t even been a baby, my doctor said, despite my morning sickness, tender breasts, and anticipatory purchases from A Pea in the Pod. It was just a mass of cells, the wrong egg fertilized. Though my husband, Greg, knew more than any of us about chromosomal abnormalities, he was superstitious—he was convinced it was because he was drunk or stressed out from his pharmaceutical company interviews when we conceived. That night had been a heavenly memory: the smell of a fire, snow falling quietly outside our bedroom window. Now it was just a storm and a mistake.

We landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Joe, from Lone Star Realty, picked us up in his mother-in-law’s gold minivan. He wore a Mexican wedding shirt that would be soaked through by the end of the day.

Our friends Daniel and Jane had recommended Lone Star Realty. Daniel finished his PhD in molecular biology a year before Greg, and we watched with fascination as he went through the recruiting process. When Daniel slipped his wrists into the golden handcuffs, which was what we called pharmaceutical jobs, he and Jane went to Texas for a weekend and returned with stories of giant houses, hot brisket, and a dip called queso. Daniel, too, had considered a teaching job, but PharmaLab’s glittering promises were too wonderful to resist. “Once you’re in, you never get out,” mused Daniel, who had shaved his grad-school beard for interviews, revealing a small, pale chin.

“But why would you want to?” Jane asked. “Did we tell you we’re getting four thousand square feet? And a flipping pool! We’re twenty-six.” She shook her head with wonder.

“I’m twenty-eight,” I said.

“See what I’m saying?” she replied, gesturing at our dumpy Bloomington apartment, where I had just microwaved us two mugs of Earl Grey. Daniel and Jane were away the weekend we visited Houston, but promised to throw us a pool party when we arrived for good.

I tried to ignore the way Joe’s hands shook, the fact that he took a wrong turn getting to the first house, and then said, “Hey, now this is cute!” as if he’d never visited the neighborhood before. We were looking at houses in the Woodlands, the planned community north of Houston where Pharma-Lab was located. We could live in a real city, Daniel had told us, but the commute would be a bitch.

The first house was on Pleasure Cove Drive. It was made of limestone, and had an orange roof. The “country kitchen” included a wood-paneled refrigerator, and the nursery was furnished from the same Pottery Barn Kids catalog I had on my bedside table. This mother had chosen the Lullaby Rocker and Ottoman in cranberry twill. I had wanted butter twill.

“Did you see the country kitchen?” asked Joe. “How about the master suite?” He seemed overly excited.

The master suite had pictures of Chicago sports teams all over one wall. A wedding photo featured a blonde with a dazzling smile. The husband was not such a looker, but hey. Someone was reading Who Moved My Cheese? in bed. The other one was reading Star.

Greg was in the yard, under a sign that said MARGARITAVILLE!

“I hate it,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “okay.” We moved toward the minivan.

· · ·

As we drove to another house, Joe chatted with himself. “Silly flooring choices,” he said, and “tiles from the wrong period.” He turned on Treasure Cove Drive and stopped in front of a faux Victorian. “Right,” he said, running a hand through his hair. He told us the price of the house, which was one hundred thousand more dollars than we could afford, even with the handcuffs.

I looked back at Greg, who shrugged. He was wearing a light blue shirt I had sewn for him—it was the color of his eyes. He had a fresh haircut, and looked weary but optimistic.

My brother, Adam, a devotee of HGTV, would have loved the house on Treasure Cove. It was solid brick—so unlike the house we had grown up in, which shook during Georgia thunderstorms—and had a media room with a wet bar and a giant deck for entertaining.

I was feeling woozy and dreamy. In a stranger’s bathroom, I changed my Maxi Pad. The bathroom had a Jacuzzi tub. I wrapped the old pad in toilet paper and stuck it in my pocket. My blood—which had cushioned the mass of cells—dripped into the toilet bowl. In the tub, someone had lit berry-scented candles. I began to feel ill. I took a few breaths, then composed myself and joined my husband, who was admiring the skylight above the bed. A stitched pillow proclaimed THE STARS ARE BRIGHT IN TEXAS. It was a mass-produced piece of junk. Perhaps no one had the time to hand-stitch in Houston. Perhaps no one had a motto worth hand-stitching. THE HOUSES ARE BIG IN TEXAS, I thought. THE HAIR IS BLOND IN TEXAS. WHAT AM I DOING IN TEXAS?

In the minivan, I said I was too tired to trek around anymore. “Sweetie,” said Greg, “we only have this weekend….”

“How about a Diet Dr Pepper?” suggested Joe. “Got a twelve-pack in the cooler.”

My empty womb was starting to cramp. “I just don’t feel so well,” I said. “I’m on antibiotics.”

Joe smoothly put the car in gear. He talked about strep throat, how he always used to get strep throat as a kid, always taking antibiotics.

“Let’s hit a few more houses,” said my husband. “Kimmy, you rest in the car. I’ll let you know if anything’s amazing.” The doctor had suggested we cancel the trip, but I had already covered my shifts, and I wanted so much to fly somewhere new, somewhere else, and buy a home. Our apartment was grimy, despite the curtains I had made from vintage fabric. The previous tenants had left old pots and pans; there was even a towel in the bathroom that said RANDY.

“You’ll be completely wiped out after the procedure,” the doctor had said, as I lay on a gurney, an IV in my arm. I was given an anti-nauseal called Regulan.

“I feel a bit weird already,” I said.

“Hm,” said the doctor, leaning in. I was her first operation of the day: I could smell the hair dryer and Aqua Net. “Do you feel anxious, jittery, like you want to jump off the table?”

“I do.”

“It’s the Regulan,” said the doctor, matter-of-factly. But I was also about to go into surgery, to have what was left of my baby scraped out. We had prematurely named the baby Madeline or Greg Junior.

“You’ll be in la la land in a sec anyway,” said the doctor.

She was right. The next thing I knew, a nurse said, “It’s all over. Now don’t forget Doc’s instructions.”

She pulled back a white curtain, and there was Greg, his eyes red. “Mouse,” he said, and he tried to smile.

The nurse continued, “Dr. O’Brien told you the surgery was fine, and you asked when you could have a margarita.”

“What did she say?” Greg and I asked in unison.

“She said Sunday.”

It was Friday night when Joe dropped us at the Hilton Garden Inn, but we ordered margaritas anyway at the Great American Grill. The espadrilles I had bought for the trip were already giving me blisters. We were depressed.

“I can’t imagine myself in any of these McMansions,” I said, poking an ice cube with my straw.

“I’m not hungry, but I’m getting fried chicken,” said Greg.

“I miss it,” I said. Greg slid his chair next to mine and took me in his arms.

“I know,” he said. “Me too.”

Three nights before, I had climbed into bed and said, “I have a little blood in my underwear.”