The Woman in Oil Fields Read Online Free PDF Page B

forgotten the Cheez Whiz.
    She accused me of not wanting the baby.
    â€œWhat do you mean? Of course I want the baby,” I said.
    â€œYou always leave the house after dark. Where do you go?”
    â€œJust walking. The Dorfmans’ve bought a brand-new Mazda. It’s a little cramped underneath, but the engine traps heat.”
    â€œYou’re unhappy living here with me.”
    â€œSweetie –”
    â€œIt’s horrible, admit it. My awful urpiness in the mornings –”
    â€œI’m with you. You know that.”
    â€œEven my fingers are fat,” she said.
    I kissed her forehead. She touched my arms. Meckie had scratched the hell out of my wrists; the marks appeared as though I’d taken a razor blade to myself over the bathroom sink.
    ______
    Ultrasound: the first snapshots of our daughter. Dr. Potts, Susan’s obstetrician, a big man with skinny lips, spread the images on his office desk for us early one morning. All I could see in the pictures were two blurry bars, like a pair of unsharpened pencils, and what appeared to be a series of holes surrounded by rippling waves. The computer-enhanced compositions reminded me of bleak Scandinavian paintings I’d seen in art classes in college – impressionistic studies of people screaming on rocky, violent seashores.
    I pointed to one of the pencils. “Is that a penis?” I asked Potts. “We’re going to have a boy?”
    â€œThat’s the head,” he said. His ears were padded with tufts of hair as pale as his papery skin. “I can’t be certain, but my guess is you’re looking at a lovely little girl.”
    Susan beamed and squeezed my fingers.
    In the Honda on the way home I carried the ultrasound prints in my shirt pocket, along with a grocery list: Cheez Whiz, cat food, Ajax, scallions .
    Susan wouldn’t let go of my hand. Today she was happy about the baby. Jessie hadn’t been penciled in on our calendar, but when we first got the news we decided to forge ahead. We’d always talked about raising a child someday. We reasoned that, eventually, most good citizens marshalled their genes and produced worthy heirs – it was one of the things that made them good citizens.
    Susan raised my hand to her lips and kissed my bitten nails. “We’ll teach her to wipe herself gently so she doesn’t get a rash,” she said, “and to go easy on the coconut when she’s baking a cake because coconut’s expensive now at the market, and we’ll show her how Peter Jennings’s face is more trustworthy than Dan Rather’s, though they’ll both be wrinkly by the time she’s watching the news, and we’ll impress on her –”
    The edges of the prints nudged my skin through the thin cotton fabric of my shirt. I shivered.
    A bulky cop stopped us at a crosswalk a block from our house. Healthy-looking children with all their limbs in place ran across the street, clanking their Back to the Future lunch pails against perfectly formed little thighs.
    Behind us a woman in a rumbling Pontiac lined her mouth with lipstick. She appraised herself rather critically, I thought, in her rearview mirror. I fantasized walking back to her car, opening the passenger door, and sliding in beside her.
    â€œAnd we’ll teach her to curtsy and to pray, and to have –” Susan caught her breath and gripped my hand till it hurt. “– unassailable character. Right, Josh?”
    ______
    The decision to have a child comes from a deep and private place in the heart, the part that holds marriage sacred, that honors long-range planning and decent behavior. And despite these family pillars, you’re never really sure if what you wanted was actually a baby .
    I tried to be happy. I tried to prepare. And all the while I was thinking, “Holy God, we’re going to be swimming in shit.”
    Susan taught me a prayer to pass on to the child:
    â€œAngel