Come Up and See Me Sometime. Erika Krouse
looked at the plate and then at my face. His voice was scorched and halting. “Do you love me that much?” he asked.
I INTRODUCED Nancy and Gary at an informal wedding reception. Nancy was Johnny’s coworker, one of those embarrassing guests who laugh too loudly at everything everyone says. Gary had wispy hair and permanently flared nostrils. He had once followed me home telling me about his pet lizards.
They talked at the buffet table for two hours, after the reception had moved outdoors, after the keg burped its last. Nancy flushed red. Her voice became even louder, her shoulders even wider. She’s in love, I thought, and turning into a man.
Nancy finally left after saying good-bye for thirty minutes. Gary stayed, holding an empty plastic cup. “Go after her,” I whispered. He hesitated until he saw her brake lights ignite in the parking lot. Then he ran toward her, waving with both arms.
Gary called me the next day. I had been up all night and wore a purple crescent under each of my eyes. Johnny was still in the bathroom, crying. “I was thinking of asking Nancy to coffee,” Gary said.
No, not coffee. A date. Say the word “date.” “Say ‘date,’” I said. “Bring flowers. Kiss her good night, with tongue.”
He repeated everything. Date. Flowers. Tongue.
In the next room, Johnny had emerged from the bathroom and was dividing our books into stacks. He got The Great Gatsby. I got Anna Karenina. Romeo and Juliet we gave away, since in that one, both of them died.
GARY TOLD me about his engagement over a hot cup of coffee. The windows were steaming in the coffee shop, and I drew little animals in the frost on the windowpane while he talked.
When Gary proposed to Nancy, it was raining, but he had planned a picnic, so they spread a blanket and sat on a curb. The chicken had gotten soggy, but the potato salad could be saved. He handed her a small white box. Nancy started crying. When she saw that the box contained a pendant, not a ring, she cried harder.
That night they called their parents. His hooted so loudly that Nancy could hear their voices through the receiver from across the room. Her parents were quiet. They said, “Oh.”
When she got off the phone, Gary asked, “How did they feel?”
Nancy said, “They said, ‘Oh.’”
Gary slept all night, but Nancy walked back and forth in the moonlight. When the sun came up, he said, she was still waiting by the window. He woke up. She looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes and said, “Okay, I’m ready for it.”
“Ready for it?” I asked, suddenly looking away from the window.
“Yeah, I guess she meant that she was okay with the idea,” Gary said.
“Is that what she meant?”
“I didn’t ask,” he said. “Who knows what anyone thinks anyway?”
I PLAYED piano at a Presbyterian wedding, for a friend of a friend. The piano was good, the flowers were fragrant, the dress was misty white. The stained glass was blue.
They looked at each other and cried through the service. They choked on their vows. They said, “Yes, I will.” I cried too as they clutched each other and kissed and kissed and kissed.
AT NANCY and Gary’s wedding reception, Johnny and I did the wave-salute at each other from our respective tables. He had brought a date; she was blond, drunk, and kissing him. I had no date, but my stomach was the flattest it had ever been.
Johnny asked me to dance. I pulled close to him and smiled at his date.
“I think she’s the one,” he said.
“The one what?” I asked.
“You know,” he said. But I didn’t—not really.
I left him alone in the middle of the dance floor and asked someone else to dance. He said no, so I asked someone else. He also said no, looking at his curly-haired date.
Gary, the groom, waited for me at my abandoned table. “Do you want to dance?”
“No,” I said, “I want nothing.”
“Look at her,” he said, and pointed to his bride. So I did. Her dress was enormous—she was packed in like a lace sausage. She thumped someone on the back so hard that his hors d’oeuvre flew out of his hand and dropped to the floor.
“I love her,” Gary said, “I love her completely. My love for her is complete.”
And it was. Complete. And I wasn’t. Completely. Relief and fear tangled together, like the hands of women clutching in the air for a falling bouquet of something.
“Can you handle it?”
“Yeah, and I can kick it around, too.”
—Mae West
When I heard the news I said, “How can I be infertile when I’m the only member of my family that’s ever gone to therapy?”
The doctor pulled off her gloves and said, “Just probably infertile. You never know, miracles happen. Are you married?” I shook my head. She said, “Then what does it matter?” She left the room, closing the door behind her. I slowly pulled my feet out of the stirrups.
The rest of the day, I felt different. When I drove back to the office I thought, Look at the infertile woman in the car, driving a stick shift. At the supermarket salad bar I thought, Infertile woman selects a tomato.
But then I realized, maybe this is the answer. I’ve always felt secretly disgusted with new mothers. I hate how they say, “I just want to spend all my time at home with my baby.” Yeah, and I just want to spend all my time in the Oval Office with Ben and Jerry, but we can’t all manage that, can we?
Then there’s the way they talk incessantly about their bodies, and what baby eats for breakfast. And that maternity leave, extending indefinitely until they don’t know how to run all the latest computer programs anymore.
But that’s just rich women, mothers with the luxuries of both money and partner. The rest of them take correspondence courses to finish their mail-order MBAs, when all they ever wanted to do was paint pictures. Or tap dance. Anything but what they’re doing now: searching for affordable day care and thinking of creative ways to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Suffering for the sake of the future, which is the ultimate form of procrastination. No way, baby. So to speak. Not me, anyway.
MY FRIEND Mona called me at work. “I forget. Does the rabbit die or not? When you’re pregnant?”
“Dies. ‘The rabbit died.’ Yeah, that sounds right.”
Silence on her end while I kept typing. Then, dryly through the receiver, “So what do I have to do? Knit a booty?”
I froze, arms suspended above the keyboard in a Frankenstein pose. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah. Shit. Shit.”
I turned and my chair squeaked. Mona said, “It’s David’s. Don’t congratulate me. I’m going to 86 it. Will you come? Be the, uh, daddy?”
“Of course. David won’t go?”
“David doesn’t know. Hey, that rhymes.” I didn’t say anything. She said, “Oh come on, Stephanie.”
“You should tell him.”
“Not David. He tells Hillary jokes. David eats bacon for breakfast every day.”
“So, he’s a little conservative. What do you expect? We live in Colorado Springs.”
“He’d make me