“By the time,” Sandra said, her voice lower now, she was speaking more slowly, “I went to that Home Depot, we’d been married almost twenty years. And we’d been trying for a child for almost ten. By trying I mean, just, you know”—a hurry-up motion with her right hand—“nothing fancy, just not being careful. We wanted a kid but we didn’t”—she shrugged—“we didn’t want to push it. I’d had, in that decade—” She inhaled, said this next part quickly, “Two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy,” exhaled. “So by the time, well—we figured it wasn’t going to happen and we’d made our peace. Russ, that was my husband, Russ had younger sisters and they had kids and I was a beloved aunt, am still a beloved aunt. Well.” She smiled. “Perhaps slightly less beloved. Anyway. I was going to learn how to draft and Russ was getting into woodworking, obviously, he was building me the desk, I mean, we’d figured it out. We weren’t unhappy.” Sandra sighed. “But then I went to this Home Depot. I picked out the wood and I picked out the stain and I wrote the names down on a piece of paper and I picked up a level, which Russ had asked me to buy since I was going to Home Depot anyway, and I got in line. And in line, in front of me, there’s this couple. A boy and a girl. I close my eyes and I can still see the backs of their heads at the moment I become aware of them. Two normal heads with normal hair, totally unremarkable. Kids, both of them. Well, kids to me, in fact they were probably in their early twenties. She has her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder and she’s leaning into him like she’s trying to get every part of her body as close to every part of his body as she can. This kind of physical intimacy, that’s how I can tell they’re young. I mean, there’s the clothes and the pimples on his chin that he keeps poking at with his finger, and how smooth her skin is, but the thing I notice first is how she’s leaning into him, and only kids do that in public, little kids with their parents, wrapping their bodies around mommy’s leg, and big kids with their boyfriends and their girlfriends. Like if they’re together, doesn’t matter where, they’re not going to waste that time, that precious time, being even inches apart. It’s a little—I mean it’s a lot, sometimes, to look at, that kind of need, in public. It can be—well, it can be disgusting. Especially if they’re also kissing and usually they are. But there’s something, or, looking at these kids I felt also there was something, sacred isn’t the word, but they were treating this mundane moment, Sunday afternoon in a crowded Home Depot, waiting in line to check out, they were respecting this moment, they were insisting it was too good and special a moment not to honor with this display. There was a kind of, I don’t know, reverence to it. Gross as it also was. A kind of honesty.”
Sandra sighed. “I’m stalling again. But okay what happens next is basically nothing. What happens next is the girl, she has this really long, sort of light brown hair, not mousy, what I guess you’d call honey-colored, and not straight, it’s got a little wave, a little muss to it—I mean, it was a little greasy, too, if I’m being completely honest—and he turns his body toward hers and he lifts her hair, he takes this big handful of hair and he lifts it off her neck, and she’s got this—she’s got this extraordinary, this neck, this long, thin, pale neck. And I mean nothing about this couple is elegant, she’s wearing sweatpants and he’s wearing basketball shorts, and so this neck—it’s sort of shocking, this neck belongs on a ballerina, not on some— Anyway, out comes this beautiful neck and he leans down and kisses her, tenderly, this soft little peck, right behind her ear, where the neck starts to turn into head. And, like, okay, this is definitely gross. Like, my usual attitude toward this kind of display is Get a room, is, Some of us are just trying to buy levels here. But what I feel, looking at them, it’s not frustration or annoyance or disgust. What I feel is something”—she clenched one hand—“in my chest tightening, something in my stomach falling, and—and this is the part that, in that moment, I am completely confounded by, because what I also feel is—” A pause. “What I’m confused by is that these feelings, they’re coming from—” Another pause. “I’m older and maybe there’s not a ton of romance in my life and you’d expect, I mean I would expect to feel a kind of envy of the girl, of her youth and the intensity of her desire and the intensity of this guy’s desire for her. But what I feel”—intake of breath—“what I want, actually, is to be the one kissing her neck. It’s like when, when you go to the eye doctor and they’re checking your prescription, when they’re getting close to the right one and they slide the, whatever it is, the glass with the right magnification in front of your eye and suddenly the blurry chart on the wall that you’ve been looking at sort of jumps into focus. All my life, witnessing these scenes, I’d been imagining myself as the girl and feeling, you know”—Sandra shrugged—“feeling like This is the thing I’m supposed to want, feeling like Okay, sure, seems like I want it, and all of a sudden there’s like this”—she snapped her fingers—“the right glass slides down and there’s this jump and I realize, Oh no, it’s the guy, I want to be the guy.” Sandra sighed, shook her head, took another sip of wine. “I think I stole the level,” Sandra said. “I know I stepped out of the line, I remember bumping, sort of crashing, into whoever it was behind me, I was in such a hurry. I know I left the store. And now Russ owns a level, so. But so I get home and there’s my husband and he’s sitting in the living room of the house we own and he’s eating off of one of the plates his mother gave us as a wedding present and it seems so clear, it seems so clear that this is my life. And the moment at the Home Depot, it gets”—Sandra waved a hand—“put away. I mean, later of course I think back over my”—she grimaced—“sexual history, how uninterested I was in dating all throughout high school and college, how I married the first man I slept with, how the best thing I can say about my sex with him is that it is never unpleasant, and certain things become— But women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex, right? I mean, this is what I was raised, what I’ve been telling— Anyway.” Sandra laughed, a sharp bark of a laugh. “Three days later I miss my period. Which is actually comforting because it helps explain what happened at the Home Depot, right? My hormones were all over the place, signals got crossed, thank god I didn’t, you know, bring it up with Russ. The next few weeks are just waiting. Waiting in doctors’ offices, waiting by the phone for test results. Russ and I decide that if the amniocentesis doesn’t come back clean we’ll abort. We remind ourselves there’s a chance the procedure itself will cause a miscarriage. Basically we’re trying not to get our hopes up. And we’re not telling anyone so that in case it doesn’t work out, which it probably won’t, we won’t have to—” Sandra swallowed the last of her wine, poured herself another glass. “Anyway, we’re trying to prepare ourselves. But then we make it ten weeks, twelve weeks, fourteen. I get the amnio and I don’t miscarry and it comes back clean and we’re at sixteen weeks, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four. We call our parents, we tell our friends. And now it’s real, it’s happening, this thing we’ve wanted for so long. I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a child.