George started it: The vision of Annalise implanted Sunday night when he returned from the reunion. Louise saw a woman who hadn’t aged, an exotic blonde- Louise was brunette-with blue-ish gray eyes who knew, as if through her containment, how to flirt. (Louise didn’t.) Annalise sat in lotus position on a terracotta carpet with an enviable calm, and a sugary scent around her. The image was imperturbable and persistent as any obsession. She was irresistible, glowing, like a piece of gold found in soil. Louise tried to distract herself but the unflappable Annalise would pull her back with her shining hair, her straight spine. Louise tried to deflate her, whom she had never met: Annalise, tempting and novel to George, had once been a girl, and before that, a baby. But this line of thinking didn’t shrink Annalise’s power: a baby, what grew inside of Louise, was miraculous, and was her parallel obsession.
“Who did you see?” Louise had casually joked, “any old flames?” Surprisingly, George blushed and then turned away from her to rummage for a corkscrew. She watched his hands thick and busy in the drawer, loved his thumbs. “I caught up with this odd person, Annalise Limon. She’s actually this brilliant underachiever. She is a travel agent and a yogi but she was once a Skinner baby.”
Louise remembered B.F. Skinner from college. The behavioral psychologist who was thought a genius or a fascist. “The babies in boxes? That Skinner?”
“Not always in boxes, but yes. The babies who spent a lot of time in boxes. I think it did something to her. She’s really odd.” George opened some wine. He told Louise that Annalise had stayed in a kind of bubble until she was two and a half coming out only for feedings and essentials.
“What was she like in college?”
“She wasn’t a baby then,” he said and Louise recalled how George, too, knew how to flirt.
She cut the onion for their meal and thought 1. “She wasn’t a baby then,” had a tone to it that implied her womanliness; the odds were they’d once fucked. 2. He had opened a buttery wine she loved and couldn’t drink. 3. How could a parent put their baby in a box? Jealousy mingled with affection; she felt tenderness for the baby Annalise like she did for the rambunctious girl growing inside of her. She tried to push the two babies away and be present. “Who else did you see?” She asked and George listed a few people some she’d heard of and some she hadn’t.
As a woman with another being’s welfare in mind, Louise was more disciplined than ever. She ate from all food groups, avoided mercury, took folic acid. Still, needs, needs, knocked in her soul- hunger, the need to sleep, a desire- despite the lumbering roll of her new body, for sex-all this sloshed through her along with acid reflux, a searing in her throat she had never experienced before, swollen ankles and a tricky brain. Her brain was at once vague and over-active, a bed of embers, hot and urgent but frustratingly inexpressive, unable to leap into flame. She fingered George’s reunion tote bag. He loved and collected canvas bags like this. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“Just hungry,” she said. But it was also that he was back and somehow had added to her needs by his proximity. She wanted him. He was back from the east coast, the sharpness of it still clinging to his words, the seemingly cleaner outline of his body. She had missed him while he had reunited with the Skinner baby.
“I missed you too, Lou,” he said, sensing the truth. Her missing, her wanting was not the same as it had been before she was pregnant; it quickly turned ravenous, even officious. She wanted with conviction. She was sure that in this state she’d make an ideal judge- the truth of desire, and of everything, came to her instinctively and, it seemed, clearly. She hugged him, her belly pointing to one side in order to get closer. But her pelvis could not touch his anymore, her once prominent hip bones were now toothpicks lost in flesh, her ribcage was a net of feathers painfully holding a bowling ball. “I missed you too much,” she said.
He hugged her firmly but it was in a way that meant only endearment. At thirty-four weeks she had not wanted him to go away. At any moment she could go into labor. This was unlikely and there were no signs of it from her recent doctor’s visit but the countdown, the inexorable pull of days toward the unknown consumed Louise. “What do you think of the name Morgan?” George asked, then immediately looked crestfallen when he saw her squinch up her nose in distaste.
“Should we check the site?” she asked to humor him. They liked to check names for their rating on the social security name website. They wanted something original. There were seven thousand Caitlins born the year before and eight thousand Mckenzies. Some unknown force in the culture influenced naming. It was growing harder to be unique. Skinner had known that. You might think you were being original but something larger, some cultural sanction or punishment influenced your decisions.
George sighed. “I’m just really tired,” he said, “and hungry- we can look later.”
It was a crisis: to Louise, the baby seemed unnamable, like a spiritual presence, always felt but beyond or before words. Like the preverbal sense of colors, bright splotches seen behind closed eyes, she knew the baby but could not name her. To friends who asked, Louise and George placated them with fake names that were simple and unobjectionable-Ann and Claire. Throwing them bones as if to keep between the two of them the strife of naming.
Louise went to bed unsatisfied. George was too tired to even cuddle. That night she dreamt of Annalise and George kissing. She had stumbled into them at a garden party at their college president’s house. They were all eighteen again and Louise had her old figure, her slim ankles and bony hips. Her waist. When she apprehended George, he said,
“Oh Louise, she is yours, all yours. You know that.”
And so she was. Awake the next morning, Louise brushed her teeth while Annalise entered the rosy space in her mind and sat in lotus. Louise pictured Annalise, miniature but perfectly proportioned, lounging in the crook of Louise’s collarbone.
At breakfast George ate his eggs quickly, forking them onto his toast, glancing at the paper as he ate. She watched him and the eggs and the paper. He was sweet to her. Delicious. But how was it she could not reach him? Could not enter his orbit. Or was it simply that she inhabited her own? She was inside her own hormonal bubble. She was confined like the Skinner baby, that sexy, sad girl, like her own baby, hidden, living mystery inside of her. “Tell me more about the reunion George, so you got the tote bag, I see that. How many divorcees? Who was fat and who was bald?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Some people looked just the same. Others were pasty, middle-aged.” George was a curator. He stopped speaking as if in reverie, in the way he did when he saw an especially moving portrait. He looked at faces and paintings with an unnerving penetration. “It was as if some people, you’d look at them and it would take a while to register and it wasn’t until you heard their voice or saw some expression in their eye, that you knew, Dave Sand!” Louise felt the baby move and took George’s hand and placed it on her belly.
“Missed it,” he said, “Why does she always stop moving when I try?” he looked hurt then pulled his hand back. She grabbed his wrist, “Stay, be patient,” she said but it was again as if she was telling someone about a ghost she saw but when she took them to the haunted room it had vanished. The baby was coy with George, withholding. Yet she knew it had been there an instant earlier, the light pattering like wings followed by a stronger thumping. She looked at the mole on George’s cheek. She had always liked it but now she examined it for whiskers. He looked new to her, the mole, strange. Who was he? How had their realities- once like a kind of twin perception- become so disparate? His hand remained. Nothing moved. She let his hand drop. “What was the Skinner baby like when you knew her? How did she survive after the big experiment?”
“She was always odd. But in a good way, a good—“ he hesitated “-she’s a good person. She was-” he stopped speaking, shook his head and laughed at something.
“She was funny?” He didn’t answer her. Annalise was sparkling and transcendent. A dry wit. Louise told herself there was nothing to be jealous of: something more important was inside of her. She and George had concocted a resonant and ancient science experiment. The baby was a fusion of the two parents, something they shared, yet at the same time the baby was the thing that separated them.
An odd person. “George that was almost fifteen years ago. She might not be odd anymore. What was she like this time?”
“Oh, still odd,” he said, “Trust me. It is just the way she relates is, um-“ he laughed then as if remembering something particular but he didn’t continue.
Since when was odd, bad? Louise was odd and George had liked it. A good person sounded familiar to her too. When they’d first met Louise was depressed and had often cried to George. “You’re a good person,” he told her when she wept and then he’d pull her to him and slide her jeans down off her hips, kiss her belly. It had never occurred to her that this was perhaps George’s thing: Odd women in distress whom he knew how to comfort. She shook her head, felt her mind inventing where it hadn’t before and had no reason to.
Louise left the table to get dressed. She was going to walk by the lake. She didn’t work in the jewelry store on Mondays and liked playing a Gold-Coast housewife exercising by the water. She had been a goldsmith, or at least trained as one, but it was precious, too expensive a thing to actually be. They couldn’t just buy hunks of gold for her to mold. But it wasn’t just the money; Louise found, after graduate school, that she lacked an artist’s bravado. The will and bravery to be alone and play with the materials. As she dressed she thought about the Skinner baby drinking a gin and tonic at the reunion. It was June and surely George and Annalise had stood in the president’s garden on the slate patio she’d dreamt of. As she struggled to lean over her waist to tie her sneakers she could almost smell the quinine on Annalise’s breath, see the white gloss of her teeth; the Skinner baby, like a Mafioso, was a close talker. George might have taken a step back, or he might have been pinned- happily!- against a wall of ivy.
When Louise came back into the kitchen she said, “You liked her, didn’t you?” The embers sputtered and spit. It was not what she’d intended to say.
“Who?” he said, half listening, and looking up from his Art in America. His round glasses were sharp around his nose. Louise said nothing. Her husband was effete. She knew that attraction was mysterious, swirled around perceived reality, even altered it. He was sexy to her, yet people often guessed George was gay. “Who Sweetie?” he said again, but Louise knew he knew.
They had an unspoken rule; each other’s sexual history was of no relevance. Or rather, was private, so they had not fully revealed them to one another. What was the point? When you marry at thirty-two and live at the beginning of the twenty-first century the lists, she knew, could be devastatingly long. Hers was. How could she possibly explain the number forty-two? Losing her virginity at fifteen, and meeting George at thirty meant fifteen years of sex averaging 2.5 partners per year. Promiscuous sometimes. Other years, blank. Certain men monopolized whole sets of years. It was another life and now seemed fake and insignificant compared with this one. What mattered, they’d decided, was honesty now.
They drove to Michigan Avenue together. Louise liked her freedom and also disdained it. But handling gold was the only thing she loved to do. George urged her to apply for grants but she was not confident enough and the secret of her talent, if it could be called that, was starting to wither and grow bitter within her. As the baby’s birth grew closer she knew she would have to become something else; yes a mother, but some other calling must be there for her. Before she got out for her walk George pulled over and put bunny kisses all over her cheeks, eyelids and neck. This is love, she thought while being kissed. This must be luck. But after reflecting on their late dinner and no sex and this quick Monday morning, their reunion after his reunion was over felt stingy and incomplete. The new hunger dominated and she could not get enough of him, enough of anything.
The lake shined its falsetto, Caribbean blue. The baby stopped moving when she walked, lulled by her gait. She thought of the cruelty of the Skinner experiments. Poor Annalise. Yet maybe the box provided an illusion of safety, as innocently as a playpen or a crib. Then again playpens had fallen out of vogue and the empty crib acquired the look of a cage when one read about “attachment parenting” and the ideal of the family bed. After her walk, Louise took the train home and went to the computer. She had studied some psychology but it was fuzzy now. She looked up B.F. Skinner. First she discovered his daughter, Deborah, the subject, some said victim, of the first “baby tender.” The baby tender was a comfortable, climate- controlled box with air vents and a glass front portal, erroneously referred to, his defenders said, as a “Skinner Box.” A Skinner Box was a cage he used in his earlier experiments with animals. Skinner found he could affect their behavior by offering a reward or a punishment. A controversy stormed about whether or not Deborah Skinner was alive and well or had killed herself as a result of her early confinement. Chat rooms were devoted to the dispute, with a cult following on either side.
His detractors said the air crib was a baby box no different than those used for animals. Skinner didn’t believe in free will, desiring to shape and mold society one individual at a time. Operant conditioning meant that each subject would respond according to reward or punishment. That is all there was. No individual will existed beyond that. How could Louise even dream of making anything original in gold? There seemed to be no room for individuality if we only sought affirmation. No wonder Annalise was a travel agent. The rewards were probably very predictable. Tickets to wonderful places, seats in first class. Louise herself had found no clear route to reward.
Maybe interest was its own reward and Louise suddenly wanted to know what material the boxes were made of, how were they constructed. Could she with her goggles and torch have fired a little cage for their own baby? The babies were purportedly let out for essentials but how did Skinner construe the word “essential?” The current literature on child development stressed the importance of being held. If you were inside a box you were safe but untouched. Allegedly Deborah Skinner herself reported that the only effects of the box were that she learned to be “self- sufficient” and had prehensile toes. (She stretched her tiny legs between the bars of the box to pick up an errant toy.) Even so, Louise found herself among the wary.
Deep in research, Louise was freed of her needs. She hadn’t yet eaten lunch when the phone rang at three. It was George, she guessed, wondering about what they’d do for dinner.
“Hello?”
“Oh,” A female voice said, “You’re not George.”
The voice was deadpan.
“No,” she paused and walked to the kitchen, the receiver hot in her hand, “who’s this?”
“Are you his wife?” Louise didn’t answer. She filled a pot with water to make spaghetti.
“I have some pertinent information for him, something he wanted to know. I am calling from Cambridge Travel.”
“Oh?”
“I’m Annalise Simon,” she said in a monotone Louise hadn’t imagined. “We saw each other at the reunion and he said something about a trip to Turkey you were thinking of.” Louise was frozen. Golden Annalise stood up out of lotus and rolled her neck a few times. She was lovely and ethereal with a blasé pout to her dark lips. “Is this a bad time to call?”
“No, no, go on,” Louise said, shocked as if she had conjured the caller herself. “We are planning something.” And then a proprietary feeling compelled her to say, “We never took a honeymoon, so-”
“I can tell you some information I found, or you could have George call back if you’d prefer.” The voice remained calm, unflappable even as she conveyed the polite awkwardness of having called the wrong person. There was dust in that voice, something musty like smoke inside an attic. Annalise was a genie trapped inside a bottle, a rare Persian blonde washed up on the shores of the Bosphorous. When Louise didn’t say anything, Annalise said, “Well I will give you my number and hang up then.” The voice was sensible but dulled, almost robotic.
“No. Don’t.”
“Don’t give you my number?” Again her response was so literal it seemed inhuman. Where were Annalise’s nerves? Her voice was a flat ribbon, conveying no emotion. Louise wanted to stoke something from her, an unexpected, rather than conditioned response.
“I meant you don’t need to hang up, you could tell me a little about Turkey.”
“I suppose I could.” Her voice sounded strained here, vaguely sad but more exhausted. “George mentioned your interest in Capadocia and the library at Ephesus, and of course Istanbul. I’d recommend a guide in Istanbul and have a few names I can send you. Let me get all of your data, your address, before we begin.”
“Well you have our phone number- I guess George gave it to you.”
“Yes,” she hesitated, “I thought this was his work number.”
In her mind’s eye, Annalise walked across the carpet, stretching her long arms over her head. She arched her back then yawned like a bored cat.
“At the reunion,” Louise began, “it must have been strange after all this time to- how was the reunion?”
“It was mostly uneventful. I went because I happen to live in Boston-“
“Oh?”
“And I had to tell George something.”
Louise realized George must have called Annalise about this trip before the reunion. “Oh about Turkey?
“No.” There followed the smoky pause, an ancient scent.
“You knew he would be there?”
“I had a feeling,” she paused, “Louise.” George must have mentioned her name.
What had Annalise had to tell George? She looked into the pot of water, added some salt. She walked back to the computer where the screensaver showed images of flowers swaying in a meadow. A bumblebee darted at the center of a flower. She couldn’t ask. Her throat was clogged with emotion ; she might cry.
“Well, I will tell him to call you then,” Louise said curtly.
Annalise recited her phone number blandly and said, sighing, “I’m sorry to bother you at home.”
When they hung up, Louise felt startled, light headed. Annalise didn’t seem as much like a flirt as a Russian spy in a Bond movie. This was worse, even more alluring. George came home and she said nothing. How could she begin? As they got ready to go- they were meeting some friends for Indian food- she abruptly said Annalise Simon had left a phone message.
“Oh, good. I had asked her about Turkey. Did she leave her number?”
“Um hum.”
“What’s wrong?” George asked once they were in the car. He picked his nose with his thumb as he drove. How was it she didn’t mind this? Attraction had given way to familiarity, which had then catapulted into a kind of total acceptance.
“Nothing. Did you talk to Annalise about me?”
“Mentioned you of course. Are you married is the first question people ask. Why?”
“She knew my name.”
George was silent. Stoic on the face of her sputtering ash. Louise watched his profile, wondered if he went with Annalise to the rosy room, the enclosed ancient bottle with a plush interior, a velvet banquette. Then it occurred to her. “Is Annalise married?”
“Divorced.”
Of course. It was getting worse. She had read that divorced women in their thirties experienced a sexual renaissance. There they were against the ivy wall, George removing his round glasses, Annalise’s hair like a curtain around their faces as they kissed.
“Are you going to call her back?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Of course you would, she is just very weird George, she was very rude with me,” she said and as she did so it seemed true.
“Rude?”
“I don’t know, maybe not rude exactly. She said she had something to tell you and not about travel plans, that she went to the reunion to tell you the thing whatever it was.”
George laughed again.
“What is so funny?”
“The way she is so cryptic about it.”
“About what, George?”
“Hey, don’t George me…”
“Well what do you expect me to think? What was so important that she had to tell you and why is it she had to see you?” The words tumbled out despite herself and it was disastrous relief, the crashing of a wave, in which she had landed on her feet but totally naked.
“Honey, please. She wanted to tell me about her life, nothing specific. Don’t.”
Louise felt her face grow hot and heartburn shoot up into her throat. The waves were huge before her. They would keep coming. Her feet seemed to beat in her shoes. She was beached, enormous. It seemed he would never know her again, would never know the Louise that was beneath all these new layers, within this bubble. The word dalliance came to her. She sniffled a little then tried to be mature about it. When your spouse experiences a metamorphosis like pregnancy, a sexual dalliance seemed perfectly natural. She bounced this phrase in her mind as if to believe it.
After he’d parked he turned to her and stroked her padded knee. “What is it?” he said.
“I am just so ridiculous right now.”
“No-no, you’re just pregnant.”
“I can’t help it, George. Tell me what Annalise wanted to tell you.”
He sighed, exasperated.
“Don’t be exasperated with me!”
He closed his eyes then rubbed them underneath the frames as if trying to control his annoyance with her.
“She said she was a travel agent.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah and that she thought it was great that I had gone to grad school and sort of followed through with what I was always interested in. “
“Why did she become a travel agent if she’s so brilliant.”
“Did I say she was brilliant?”
“You did.”
“Jesus. She was just very smart ok and we had talked a lot in college about ambition and what we might do with it, and at the reunion she said she realized she just wanted to do something boring professionally and be smart in other ways.”
It was reasonable and also a little sad.
“Don’t be insecure, Lou.”
She hated it when he said that. Conviction burned, then melted through her, abated. She blew her nose and tried to look normal before leaving the car. “Sorry,” she said. He kissed her forcefully. Yet the only certainty was that she was stuck within her own growing body.
She was quiet at dinner. It was as if a storm had risen and passed through her. She chewed her food thoroughly and each bite felt like something that saved her. Saved her with tiny fresh peas inside of pastry, saved her with a red cream, a magically fluffy bread and an anise seed used to freshen the breath. They laughed a little bit when George told their friends, “Louise is going to sign a piece of paper admitting she’s crazy in advance.” He was talking about a document distributed in their birthing class about post-partum depression. It contained the words of a hypothetical new mother asking her partner to make decisions for her should she encounter this true affliction. On the bottom was a line for the mother-to-be to sign. “Craziness has its place,” Louise said, biting into the cool seed, and secretly deciding not to sign it.
A restrained tenderness settled between the two of them on the way home. In bed, Louise fell asleep in George’s arms.
She dreamt of holding Annalise; the smooth torso, the silken, golden skin glided under her swollen hands. They kissed in a way that felt like fusion, osmosis and while kissing she read the blonde’s mind:
I belong to nobody, she said, I am all alone.
She pulled away and stroked the woman’s hair, then lifted her and rocked her in her arms like a baby until she fell asleep. She placed her in the middle of her and George’s bed- the crib seemed too cage-like and cold-and she kept an eye on her breathing for a long time as if to make sure it continued.
When she woke up George was stroking her, kissing her back and neck. His hands were large and wonderful as if he knew exactly where she was sore. “If it feels perfunctory-” she began.
“It doesn’t.” he interrupted her.
Later the next day, George made Louise sit with him when he called Annalise back. They would go to Istanbul next summer when the baby was one. There were certain mosaics George needed to see. He was trying to get a grant so they could stay longer.
“Annalise is sort of ordinary, isn’t she?” Louise said when he’d hung up.
“She is actually.”
Annalise was ordinary and also very fine, and she had become, although George would never know it, someone that belonged to Louise, to the life of her mind.
Emotion like a bubble had floated up and propelled her. Yet, the same bubble also propelled love, was what she felt for George at breakfast what she felt for the baby, already. And how could it be that a mere idea, a slip and a smear, a shadow person, was now a being inhabiting her? And how could it be that she loved this presence already?
At the store that day, she placed gold earrings in a display case. She could feel yesterday’s rage still pricking but dissolving, melting away from her face and cheeks. It had billowed up as if to engulf them. There was something within her, good, but requiring measurement, like some exquisite, highly flammable silk. She feared its return. But she resolved to do what was right for the mystery girl inside of her. Let it go out in an exhale, a million pricks of sympathy, a million pangs of jealousy. Let the girl go and breathe.
In the evening, she heard his key in the lock. A familiar bolt of excitement ran through her. There would be black beans he made so well. More kisses. A visit to the site for girls’ names. Their life was ordinary too.
“You’re crying Louise, what is it?” he said when he saw her. She tried to tell the truth. She partially did.
“It’s happiness, I think. You know me.” He cupped her face in his large hands. He did know her. He did.
“Hormones I think.”
“You think?” she said. And they laughed inside their small apartment. A safe place and one that floated too. Quite suddenly it seemed to detach from the street and move soaring high up over the city, over Cabrini Green, the clotted neighborhoods and alleyways, up over the spires of the Hancock Building where they had their early boozy dates, up over the lights of commerce. The two of them and the girl they did not know yet floated out above the dark water.
Other Voices, 2007