“And maybe this isn’t unexpected or unusual, but I should say,” Sandra continued, “that my pregnancy was a nightmare. Morning sickness all day for the first three months, couldn’t keep anything but saltines and Gatorade down. I started keeping—this is embarrassing but,” Sandra laughed, the sound lower and gentler, “no more embarrassing than anything else I’ve shared so far. I started keeping an empty trash can by my desk just in case I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Made sure there was always a fresh trash bag in it. I only used it a couple times but that was enough, my whole cube reeked of bile for weeks. Though that could have been my imagination, I was so sensitive to smells then, if someone walked by eating a banana I’d feel nauseous for hours. And my teeth hurt. And then my hair started falling out and my nails stopped growing and somehow I was losing weight. This was in the first two, three months. Real horror-movie stuff. But so then at sixteen weeks, this is right after the amnio, I start gaining weight. A lot of weight. Fifteen, twenty pounds, like, overnight. And I keep gaining weight, more than I’m supposed to be gaining, the line on the chart is, like, exponential. And suddenly nothing fits, not even my maternity stuff, and my ankles start swelling and I’m hungry all the time, starving. I buy these enormous overalls and I start living in them when I’m not at the office. For the office I have a series of shapeless cotton dresses, these sort of really depressing curtains—I mean, you must have seen me wearing them. And Crocs. I’d squeeze my feet into flats when I had to go into meetings, but in my cube I wore compression socks under Crocs, that’s pretty much all that fit.
“Anyway.” Sandra exhaled, set her glass, half empty, down on the table. “I’m five months pregnant. I’m so hungry after work that I’m buying an entire rotisserie chicken on my way home at least twice a week, parking my car in the driveway and picking the carcass clean, throwing the bones in the trash before I walk into the house. I’m waking up in the middle of the night and driving to diners for fried pickles and a milkshake. I’m putting ranch dressing on everything, going through a bottle or two a week. People start asking me if I’m having twins. Start telling me I look ready to pop. Saying things like You know, my kid was a couple weeks overdue, too, it’s not a big deal, sometimes they just need a little extra time to bake. And as soon as they say bake I’m thinking, Hey, it’s been twenty minutes since I last ate, I’m hungry.
“So I’m at five months, five and a half. This is a Saturday afternoon. I’m driving home from the movie theater. I’ve started going to the movies once, twice a week. Or, actually, what I’ve started doing is buying movie tickets so I can get inside the movie theater so I can get to the snacks. The nacho cheese dip they serve, I’m addicted to it. Can’t find it anywhere else. And sure, I could tell the ticket taker, Look, I’m pregnant, I need some nacho cheese, I’m not going to see a movie, can you just let me in. But somehow that’s more embarrassing than buying a ticket for”—Sandra waved a hand—“one of the Hunger Games movies. Now I can’t even remember which one, and I must have bought tickets to it ten or twelve times, going theater to theater, just in case someone got suspicious. I mean suspicious of— Anyway. This one day, it’s a Saturday, a Saturday afternoon, I’m driving back from the movie theater, one hand on the wheel, one hand in the nacho cheese sauce, and one minute I’m driving by a strip mall with a Home Depot in it, with the Home Depot in it, and the next I’m parking my car.
“And even now I don’t—I mean, what did I think would happen? That the same couple would be there again? And even—I mean even if, by some wild coincidence, they had been, there wasn’t anything— Maybe I would have followed them around the store? And if I had, honestly, I don’t—I don’t know what I was hoping for. Some kind of magic, obviously, but whether I wanted the—the moment, the feeling, I’d experienced before, whether I wanted it replicated or explained or whether I wanted it somehow reversed, I—” Sandra trailed off. She cleared her throat. “They weren’t there. Obviously. Instead I wandered up and down the aisles for a while. Not that long. The pregnancy had given me sciatica and walking for more than fifteen, twenty minutes was painful. I got gestational diabetes in the sixth month. Not exactly a surprise. I’m sorry,” Sandra said after a pause, “I guess this story is a little anticlimactic because it more or less ends here. I walked around Home Depot for a while and eventually my back started hurting and I left. And walking out I was fine, walking back to the car I was fine, and then in the car I started crying. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I was still crying when I got home. Russ told me it was just pregnancy hormones. That’s what he said when I came home sobbing and said I needed to move out. That wasn’t—” Sandra was speaking slightly slower now. “I don’t want to make him seem—that wasn’t the first thing he said. He wasn’t cold. Wasn’t unsympathetic. The opposite, actually. First thing, he got me a box of tissues. Made me a cup of chamomile tea. We sat down on the couch together and he wrapped me in a blanket”—she touched the blanket behind her—“this blanket, actually, and he rubbed my swollen feet and I tried to explain it to him.” Sandra smiled. “Which was hard. Because I didn’t know what I was trying to explain to him. I just knew that I’d—that I’d seen something. And that I’d tried to—to put it away. And that I couldn’t. And if I couldn’t, it wasn’t honest. Being married to him. It just wasn’t fair.” Sandra drank until her glass was empty and then she set the glass down. She did not refill it. “I don’t”—she paused—“I don’t believe in moments, really. Everything takes time. Me moving out, that took time, and working out a custody agreement, that took forever. And I’m still in the middle of figuring—but you said,” Sandra sighed, “you said moment. So. Okay. That moment in the Home Depot. If I had to pick one.” Sandra’s cheeks were flushed pink and there was a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “Does anyone,” she said, standing, fanning herself with one hand, the now-empty bottle of white she’d brought in from the kitchen in the other, “want any more wine?”
* * *
—
I snuck a sleeve of saltines from Sandra’s kitchen and went into the bathroom to eat them, but then it turned out I also had to pee, which meant resting the sleeve on the edge of the sink while I pulled my jeans down, maternity jeans with the stretchy side panels, the only pair that fit, and underneath them the high-waist control-top bottoms I still reinforced with panty liners because giving birth vaginally had weakened the muscles of my pelvic floor and that made bladder control more challenging, or so my gynecologist said. Practically it meant I could no longer consistently hold it. Only I had already opened the sleeve of saltines, before resting them on the ledge of the sink I mean, so that when, peeing, I reached over to grab them, I discovered that the first five or six saltines were now damp and several more had probably come into contact with the ledge though they retained no physical evidence of this encounter, which meant that they, too, would have to be dumped. I stopped peeing, dropped ten or so saltines into the bowl, resumed peeing, began snacking. There was a logic to it. I mean, I didn’t want to eat the saltines with presumably soiled hands, post-pee, and to wash with both hands would require setting the saltines down again, and them possibly getting wet again, and then having to dump more, and I needed to eat all of the remaining saltines, plus to gulp some water directly from the faucet, if I was going to drive home. Peeing, eating, I wondered how profoundly I had embarrassed myself. Not telling my story, no, Sandra’s story had been just as shaming, its telling neutralizing, retroactively justifying, mine. No it was the connection I’d imagined with Dominique that I was pondering, peeing, how I’d tilted my body toward her as I leaned over my wine glass, hoping she’d look down, see the shape of my breasts, my shirt was a V-neck and some of the pregnancy weight had settled, as weight I gain always does, in my tits, which were now, still, though I was no longer breast-feeding, surprisingly full above the cage of my ribs. I’d hoped then that she’d notice them, my tits, and I hoped now, peeing, that she hadn’t, that she hadn’t noticed me trying to get her to notice. To flirt was to expose one’s desires, an act inherently shaming. Not that I’d been flirting, exactly, my attraction to Dominique was not sexual, just as my attraction to Artemisia had not been sexual, not exactly, though in both cases the attraction was also hungry, was also greedy. It wasn’t that I wanted to fuck Dominique it was that I wanted to devour her. Wanted her to devour me. At this time I imagined intimacy as a kind of literal entanglement, which perhaps explains why, when the thrill of an intimacy newly forged wore off, my first and most powerful desire was to run. In my defense it’s very hard to get much of anything done if you’re physically attached to a second person.