Chapter 14 1989
The pain in Susan’s breast is becoming familiar, a throbbing like a tide, now swelling, now receding, demanding her notice. She arranges herself into the airport toilet, navigating the geometry of her suitcase.
For a moment, a profound clarity arrives. She feels this often now, when she is caught between two places. And in the clarity comes a thought:
Please not yet.
But now, as she frees a stream of urine onto the Colorstick, the fluorescent lights shine painful on all the plot holes in her life. The wanting and not wanting.
It brightens an unmistakable blue.
Outside the stall, the squeak and clack of women’s shoes. She breathes hard and tries to steady herself, staring at the grout between the tiles.
The taxi heads north out of Boston to Aldwych, an address that still feels unfamiliar when she speaks it, a town where large houses tuck behind woodlands and wildlife reserves.
Al spotted the “For Sale” sign on a visit to his own mother nearby.
He had fallen in love with it, he said on the phone, fervent about the project, the benefits of real countryside.
It all felt so abstract to Susan, like the desire of an older person.
But Al is older, she reminds herself, six years older.
His friends are already leaving the city.
Maybe soon, she will want it too: big empty rooms and the distant roar of the sea.
When she was small, her mother would buy her oversized coats to grow into, so they would last longer.
Besides, she was in Boston so seldom these days.
It seemed a little cost to make him happy.
But now it feels comical, her life so foreign.
New England autumn dances brilliant onto green grass.
In the front yard her husband is raking.
California seems impossible: so many dazed and reckless nights, so many choices masquerading as obvious answers, as impulses without alternative.
All of it leading her to this moment, this happening, this thing in her. And now what?
Everyone’s heard the story: a girl on a soap gets pregnant and they dump her like an old mattress.
A replacement comes in to film the next week.
You can sue, of course, but everyone knows the rules: the studio can come up with a thousand reasons to fall out of love with you. There’s nothing you can do.
Idiot, Margie says, somewhere in the back of her mind. You did this.
The taxi pulls into the driveway and her husband is opening her door, his lips finding the soft skin of her temple. Now he is moving to the trunk, paying the driver, lifting her suitcase like it’s nothing, saying:
“God, I missed you. I’m thinking takeaway, just easy—”
Fleetingly, she wonders what it would cost her to get rid of it. Would she fragment into a million pieces? Would God or the universe prevent her from ever having a child again?
“Look, I bought some candy for the trick-or-treaters. Are Kit Kats too plain? I thought you might be in danger of eating them all if I got Milky Ways—”
Oh no. She wants this. She wants the tiny shoes and tire swings; she wants little fingers in her hair and a little voice asking her questions and singing sweet songs.
She wants to make this man a father, a man who believed in her before there was anything to believe in.
She wants to hear him singing nursery rhymes and giving the world structure, only she wants it for some future Susan, some Susan who has figured that world out herself. Why must it be now?
She lingers behind as they enter their new-old house, already teeming with the props of Al-and-Susan, photographs and candlesticks and kitchen utensils. They have just repainted the shutters. They have just hung a flag from the gable over the doorway. In her hand she is clutching the Colorstick.
“Al.”
The fear must be written on her face, flowing through her, because he looks at her as though she has something terrible to say to him. She opens her palm. He plucks the test from her, studies it. Her heart beats in every part of her body, her fingertips, her ears.
“You’re not serious,” he says. “You’re not serious.”
She nods. His knees give way to a squat, and his hands clutch at his awestruck face, and his eyes cannot move from her eyes.
“Holy hell.”
He is up, his arms around her, the smell of his chest consuming her. The world recedes to a dim concern. They are conjurers. They are voyagers bound for the unknown. She looks in his eyes and sees his readiness, his unvarnished love of her, and says:
“Al, I’m scared.”
“Why are you scared?”
“I’m going to lose my job.”
“And I’m going to get tenure. It will be fine.”
She pulls away. “That’s not the point.”
“No,” he says. “I understand that.”
“I just don’t know who I’ll be if I’m not…”
“You’ll be you. You’re always you, Susie Q.”
His eyebrows furrow. He is worried about picking up the pieces of me, she thinks. He is not worried about my life.
“We’ll figure it out, Susie. You might feel differently. After.”
An abrupt estrangement falls between them.
She cannot blame him for expecting her to change.
She has always been open to change. A say yes kind of girl.
But what if this is it? If there are no more characters, no more stories?
No more transformation. No thousand lives lived in a thousand ways.
Oh, some rebel part of her is screaming that she will never feel differently after. That she will never want to stop.
“I might” are the words she says.
When he says I love you, he is talking about something distant from her. A simplified image of herself she allowed him to paint. Because she has not said: I might not.
Placing her hand in his, Susan follows him into the house.