Ask me how I remember

I thought we’d sacked the city, burned down the villages, murdered the loyalists, sown the fields with salt.  Maybe neither of us slept the last night.  At one point though there were some crashing noises that I only became conscious of very suddenly.  I could see her in the kitchen, holding plates above her head, then dropping them onto the floor, one by one.  Once she’d broken all the plates, she left.  The next time we saw each other, it was almost exactly nine months later.

--

She called me and told me she had to meet me, so we made plans for dinner.  I don’t know what I was expecting.  I almost stood her up. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, I used to do stuff like that all the time.  I’m sure she had some backup plan, or maybe she would have just let it go.

I went in and the hostess asked me whatever hostesses ask.  I walked past her without looking at her because I already saw Karen sitting there.  Her face looked fuller, healthier — she looked heavier than the last time I’d seen her, which wasn’t bad because she’s always been just short of weirdly thin.  And then I got closer and I saw she was pregnant, almost all the way.  She gave me this smile, like the smile your mother’s going to give you when you make it to heaven.

I just sat down and didn’t say anything.  I was going to wait for her.

“What’s new,” she asked.

“Nothing much.”

“You seeing anyone?”

“No.”

“I’m not asking because I want this to be a date,” she said.  “I’m just asking you how you’ve been, you understand.”

I nodded.  We looked through our menus for a while.  We ordered.  We sat there and I half-wondered where I was.

“You’re doing a very good job handling this right now,” she said.  “I’m almost sorry I told you to come.”

“But you couldn’t live with keeping it a secret,” I said.

“Oh, I could have kept it a secret.  Keeping it a secret would have been the easiest thing in the world.  I could have gone forever without telling a soul.”

They brought us our salads.  She pulled apart the lettuce with her hands.  “Fucking big lettuce leaves,” she said.

“I think you would have told me eventually,” I said.

“What’s your time frame?”

I thought.  “Before death.”

“Whose death?”

“Your death, if you died first.”

“At this point we’re just bullshitting though, right?” she said.  “I mean, it’s all just talk.”

“Well I deserved to know.  It’s a crime against nature that you didn’t tell me.”

“And now I told you.  We’re really just running in circles now here, aren’t we?  What’s the problem, do you want me to tell you again?”  I tried to remember what the problem was.  “So you’ve been told.  Someone had convinced me you deserved to know and I made the mistake of listening to that person, and here we are.”

I mulled this over.  I had the feeling I was being condescended to, but I couldn’t figure out how or why.  There was a time when I was very good at figuring out how and why I was being condescended to, but I’d been out of practice.

“So you’re sure it’s mine.”  She just gave me a look.

We were quiet for a while.  “You want to go to a strip club?” she asked me.

“No.”

“I want to go to a strip club,” she said.  She poured her Sprite into my wine glass and started drinking out of that.  “I want to see some sluts on poles.”

“Since when are you calling people sluts?”

“Motherhood will change a person,” she said.

“You’re not a mother yet.”  She made the jerkoff hand gesture.

I asked her what she was going to do with it.  “I’m going to stuff it in a dumpster.  I’m going to raise it, you fucking idiot.”

“Do you need help?”

 “Don’t try to be a fucking adult now.”

“Because I could help.”

 “I wouldn’t mind some help from an adult.  Do you know any?”

“I have a job now.”

“Does anyone at your job know your name?”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”

“The adult ship sailed a long time ago for you.”

“Just today, I had a conversation with the woman who gives everyone their paychecks.”

“The fact that you can remember one particular conversation tells me everything I need to know.  What did you even talk about?”

“She asked me where my last name was from.”

“Uh huh?”

“And I said I didn’t know.”

“Hey, that’s great.”

They brought our meals.  As soon as I saw mine I knew I didn’t want to eat it.  She ripped into a plate of crab legs.

“Well anyway,” I said, “I’d like to be around when it’s born.”

“Around?  Like in the country?”

“Stop being flippant.”

She really got a kick out of that.  “It’s going to be your standard childbirth,” she shrugged, “nothing to see.”

“Still.”

“See, this is why I didn’t want to bring you into it.  You’d get all possessive.”

“It’s not possessive to want to see the birth of your child.  Is it a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know.”  I didn’t believe her.  “What do you care?”

“Do your parents know you’re pregnant?”

“Of course.”

“How do they feel about it?”

“They think it’s a disaster,” like I should have known.

“Do any of our mutual friends know?”

“What ‘mutual friends.’  You hated my friends.”

“Well my friends then.”

“You hated half of your friends, and the other half you never wanted me to meet.”

“You wouldn’t have liked them anyway.”

“Who gives a shit.  This all happened centuries ago.”

I pictured us both in a cave somewhere, wearing pelts, faces smudged with soot, having this exact conversation.  I pictured the shower, razors slipping from my fingers, me pouring out of myself.  That wasn’t serious; it’s just a thought you have.

At some point, we got up to leave.

“Should I walk you to your train station?”

“What kind of a question is that?”
 I did start following her, but after about a block she waved me off, told me I had misunderstood and walked off very slowly — she wanted to get away as fast as she could, of course, but she couldn’t be seen walking like a pregnant woman.  Because she wasn’t a pregnant woman.  She was Karen.  And I wasn’t soon to be a father.  I couldn’t have been.  Who knows what I was.  I was a guy standing there in a wet coat watching his child get taken away.  I was thrilled to see it go.