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  Gretchen and Ray lay tangled in their many limbs, some real, some just hollow sleeves made of padded nylon, and gazed at each other in wonderment. They had made love in nothing but their earmuffs, which only vaguely muffled the cacophony coming from above. They had made love undetected and unprotected, Gretchen gasping in the middle of it as she caught sight of the saucer-shaped smoke detector on the ceiling above her, similar in shape to the diaphragm she had left on the dresser of their apartment back in Chicago.

  Upstairs, all was now silent. Ray scratched at his chest hair and uncurled himself from Gretchen’s warm body to take stock of her old bedroom. “Wow,” he said, stretching. Feeling newly aware of his surroundings, he began to make out small oddities on the shelves around him, his eyes having finally adjusted to the dark. Was that really a row of Barbies on the dresser? Was that saran wrap sealing the pink bookshelves from dust? Was that face opposite him on the wall really Strawberry Shortcake, in latch hook? And the ruffly pillow shams, covered with small raised dots—had these things really once belonged to Gretchen, the same Gretchen whose hair he’d neatly shaved that morning while sitting on the back of the toilet?

  “Don’t,” Gretchen said as she saw him craning to make out an inspirational saying at the top of a florid poster. Ray had spent much of his childhood in an intentional community outside of Viroqua, Wisconsin, where his parents, who were anarchists, had homeschooled him in a wing off the abandoned post office where they lived. Later, his mother had developed an experiential high school curriculum for him by dragging him from commune to commune in an ongoing attempt to find herself.

  “Ray,” Gretchen said quietly, placing a hand on his shoulder blade. She moved toward him, her chin bearing down on the soft tissue between his neck and shoulder. She ran a hand down his back and let it rest on his hip. “It’s cold down here. Let’s leave.”

  “What about them?” he whispered, pushing a finger up toward the ceiling. He rolled over to face her, the part in his hair appearing like a white line drawn down the center of a dark road.

  “Now may not be a good time for introductions.” Gretchen studied Ray’s face, tracing his square jaw with a finger. His hair, which was dark and waist length, was out of its braid, falling in waves along his temples and down over his muscular shoulders and upper arms. His mustache and thick beard concealed any expression she might have read on his lips.

  “What do you think about babies, Ray?” She leaned in close, tucked her nose up by his ear, and before he could answer, drew back, clenching her teeth. She drew in a breath so fast it whistled. “We may have just —” Her voice rose and then broke off.

  Ray studied her small breasts, ran a hand down the length of her body, then let his eyes survey the other side of the room. Moonlight coming in through the window lent Gretchen’s old pink desk a sickly glow. “You’re right,” he said, sitting up. “Let’s go.”

  Dancing around on the cold floor, they struggled back into their clothes, Ray into his leotard, Gretchen into overalls. While Ray fluffed the pillows, Gretchen got up on her desk chair and peeled Pluto off the ceiling. They left as quietly as they had come, using the basement door, which brought them up by the side of the house.

  When they entered the dark yard, they saw that a fresh layer of snow had fallen. The air, windless and still, seemed to encapsulate the neighboring houses, all pastel in color—like bits of fruit set in blue gelatin. Arms linked, they skirted the side of the house toward the back, hugging their bodies close to the yellow siding, until they came upon the kitchen window, through which they could see Judy framed by fruit-patterned curtains, legs crossed at a barstool by the counter, eyes glued to the television. In one hand, she held a can of green beans with a fork in it, in the other, a liter of 50/ 50.

  She sat motionless against the olive cupboards, like a wax figurine—made only slightly more realistic by the gray roots of her neatly combed golden hair, which stood out like a shelf mushroom just above her neck and ears. Her face was pale with powder, her dull red lips parted in a partial frown. Ray stood close enough by the sill to reach in and touch her elbow had the window been open.

  “She doesn’t look a thing like you,” he marveled, surveying Judy’s maroon sweaterdress, which tied at the waist and had a huge cowl neck that billowed down over her chest like hoops of hoary skin. She was thin-boned but softly padded, with nubby features and small, girlish hands that looked as if they probably practiced perfect penmanship. When she sipped from a plastic cup on the counter, she shuddered a little.

  Gretchen shook her head and rubbed her mittens together. “That’s her,” she said. “The womb.” She stepped back and gave a little laugh at her own sense of disconnect. Lately, she’d been thinking about bodies, particularly mothering bodies, how easy it was for them to develop something inside of them, something that might grow up to become unrecognizable. Did birds, kangaroos, badgers, ever experience such alienation from their young? she wondered. Did a mother titmouse ever look at her brood and think, Who are you?

  Maybe, Gretchen thought, it was a purely human phenomenon for parents to push their children to become mirror images, and a purely human phenomenon for parents to become estranged from their children when they don’t comply. Did a mother ostrich, for example, ever scold her female chicks: “Cross your legs!” “Watch your weight!” “Hush your mouth!”?

  “Come on,” Ray whispered, turning away and thrusting his arm over Gretchen’s dark form. As they stepped around the side of the house, making for Ray’s truck parked on the next block, the double glass door on the back of the living room slid open. Ray and Gretchen drew back as a man in cotton briefs emerged and hobbled around in the snow wearing loafers, dragging what looked to be a red cooler with wheels and a short handle. He drew it up by the woodpile, where there was a gaggle of cement ducklings, and tipped his head back to study the sky.

  He stood for a moment, legs slightly bent at the knees, his arms positioned stiffly away from his body, fingers spread. He looked as if he might lift off the ground, take to the sky. Gretchen and Ray hunkered down in the shadows of meatball-shaped shrubs along the back of the house. Slowly, Rusty began to spin. He stopped to lift one leg and scratch briefly at his calf, his eyes still raised to the sky. Cold air flared from his nostrils. His silvery hair, usually neatly swept back with pomade, stuck up around his ears like spines. After a few moments, he resumed spinning, the soles of his shoes scraping against the snow. His arms were almost entirely extended now, positioned slightly back. They flapped a slow, arrhythmic pattern.

  Ray pressed his face into his sleeve to conceal his amusement. Gretchen tucked her head behind the bushes, drawing her arms in against her chest. “Drunk,” she said frostily.

  There was a clomping sound, then a muffled thump as Rusty, whose shoe must have hit the side of the cooler, toppled to the ground.

  It was Ray who jumped up, despite Gretchen’s whimper of protest. He waded out into the snow, then paused a few feet away. Rusty lay faceup, immobile.

  “Ray!” Gretchen called in a hoarse whisper.

  Ray crept closer, digging around in his pockets for his mittens, and was soon peering into the face of Gretchen’s father, a face he had never seen but which bore a slight resemblance to the woman he planned to spend his life with. Something about the heavy eyebrows, the hard line of the nose. Rusty’s mouth was slack, his eyes closed.

  Ray swept his hair back into a ponytail, securing it with his right hand, so he could press a clear ear to Rusty’s heart. He listened for a motion behind the damp T-shirt, then heard it, the slow but sure thump-thump, distant and heavy-sounding, like a lone fish flopping in a tub.

  Rusty gave a little snort. Ray sat back on his heels, then rejoined Gretchen by the house. A good minute passed before Rusty’s body stirred. Then his tan loafers began to spread, and his arms rose slowly from his sides, swooshing snow up around his head in great arcs. He was making a snow angel.

  Chapter 2

  THE CHIMP

  Thre
e months later, when the crocuses were up along the medians and what remained of the snow was strung across lawns in elongated patches like windblown lingerie, Rusty received an unexpected phone call from Gretchen at work. The call came in around noon, just as Rusty was about to start for the bank. He had a shirt pocket full of checks. With spring on its way, sales were up. People were eager for trade-ins, happy to cut quick deals that would launch them into top-down plushness. A jeweler had just dropped off a fat red Pontiac Grand Prix and in the next breath walked away with a gold Chrysler convertible with only the tiniest cigarette burn on the backseat.

  “I know you must be busy,” Gretchen said, her tone concealing any hint of excitement. “But I have something to say —” Here she paused, and Rusty could hear her swallow. He licked his lips, ran the tips of his fingers nervously along the edge of the blotter on his desk, and wondered if he’d missed her birthday.

  “I’m pregnant.” Her voice came at him in a way that was so pragmatic, so professional, that he found himself responding as if it were a business deal. “Okay, then,” he said curtly, beginning to doodle on some registration papers lying on his desk.

  “I’m due in October. Tell Mom she can call for details.”

  “It’s a deal,” Rusty said, loosening his tie.

  “I’ll talk to you later then.”

  “Righty-oh.”

  Rusty was so caught off guard, he even ended the call with his customary “Thanks for calling Glide’s Autos.” When he hung up, he sat for a moment, staring through the window at a pair of pink flamingos he had duct-taped to the antennae of two CRXs that flanked the lot’s wide drive. He gulped some cold coffee, then tossed the cup into the trash under his desk, cocking his ear as the liquid trickled satisfyingly over some cellophane candy wrappers and down around the plastic liner.

  It wasn’t until he sat squarely behind the wheel of the Grand Prix that it dawned on him: he didn’t even know who the father was. In the few times he’d talked to his daughter in the last year, she had, on occasion, mentioned a partner. And she had used the word partner—that very disconcerting modern term that made couples sound like they were in a law firm rather than a relationship. If Gretchen was going to couch her love interests in business lingo, Rusty had decided he would keep a professional distance. What he realized, though, was that he had no idea what she was up to and that the exact date of her birth had slipped his mind.

  Like his other two children, Gretchen had become an enigma. Always good at kitchen chemistry, she had gone off to school to study science and nutrition, a useful-sounding major, whatever it was. Four years later, he’d driven a white Sunbird, with just the most minor rust around the front right fender, down to her graduation at the University of Illinois, only to discover she had majored in women’s studies. She walked across the stage for her diploma with pink hair and a ring in her nose, and Rusty had sat next to Judy, holding the day’s program with white-knuckled rage.

  It was the only graduation they had ever attended. Year after year, they watched their neighbors congregate on summer lawns with their college-age children in cap and gown. Rusty, who kept a pair of binoculars by the front window for just such occasions, had always quietly observed these family gatherings—the fluttering mothers; the stiff-shouldered fathers, beaming with well-scrubbed pride; the graduates, like eaglets, looking dignified despite having to stand around in unflattering black housecoats.

  With each of his children, Rusty’s disappointment had mounted. To lose his sons—to what? what had he done?—and then to watch Gretchen, their most promising one, make a mockery of him—that’s how he saw it, a mockery—had been more than he could take. He had driven the Sunbird straight home, parked it in the lot of an abandoned rifle range he’d once frequented, and left the car to rust and blister in the sun.

  Now Rusty replayed the conversation with Gretchen in his mind as he drove to the bank and then home. It was early afternoon, prime sales time, but he couldn’t face the idea of pasting on a smile and swaggering between the rows of bright hoods as if nothing were wrong. He parked the Pontiac in the drive and entered the house through the garage. What he wanted to do was put on his dungarees, grab his 30-06 rifle, and go out to shoot something.

  He went for the closet, thrashed around among the hanging slacks for the feel of the gun barrel, and eventually got down on his knees to crawl way to the back, where he always propped it behind his wedding suit. He didn’t hunt much anymore, didn’t have the aim that he used to. His eyes were bad from squinting. If there was one thing he had learned about business, though, it was that people looked for honesty in the eyes. Obstruct them with a pair of glasses, worse yet bifocals or trifocals, and people were less likely to buy. When they scrutinized your face at that crucial moment before the close, they didn’t want to catch sight of themselves. It confused them. It reminded them that they were the same people who had set foot on the lot just two hours before.

  Rusty had also found that by squinting at his clientele, they felt he was more understanding. They read his bad vision as something genuine, a face fraught with concern. And so his bad eyesight had become both a selling point and an occupational hazard, no different, he always reasoned to Judy when she fretted over his driving, than the two times she had been thrown back onto the sprung-wood floor of the junior high gym by an erratic volleyball. Swerving around such hazards was part of living in the world.

  Rusty batted at the back of his closet, overturning shoes and slippers, kneeing a box of Judy’s old letters he kept there, but the gun was gone. He was sure he hadn’t put it elsewhere, unless maybe he had mistakenly put it on Judy’s side. The closet, with its two sets of shuttered doors, was one continuous passage. He squeezed around a footstool and was soon pushing his hunky form through a miasma of double-knit pants and floral wraparound skirts. At the far end, he found his nose embedded in a floor-length turquoise negligee he had given Judy after Carson’s birth. He inhaled along its hem for the scent of her. It smelled only faintly of night cream and fabric softener.

  He felt lost for a moment. Judy was, at times, still a complete mystery to him. She had secrets—not big ones, he felt, not big enough to confront—but, from time to time, he noticed things: the odometer on her Datsun would be two hundred miles ahead of the day before, though she’d claim to have gone nowhere but work. He’d find a ticket stub on the floor in the hall, though she would not have mentioned going to a movie. Who knew what she did with her time? He couldn’t remember the last book she had read or even what she ate for breakfast.

  If he thought seriously about it, he began to despair. He’d find himself, on a day like today, in her closet, sniffing her clothes for some scent, some trace of what she was like. But he’d find nothing there, just a generic female sort of smell, the way all the Realtor trade-ins stank of perfume and baby aspirin. And he’d end up sitting on the corner of the bed at the end of the day, trying to imagine her in the doorway, facing him with her neatly aligned limbs, her little belts that cinched her waist just below her bosom, the little pear-shaped rose-quartz earrings she liked to wear, her narrow feet in their good shoes making ruts in the carpet. He could always picture her when she was away— her presence hung about like a specter—but he was at a loss to conjure anything more, the texture of her hair between his fingers, the sound of her breath by his ear, the scent of her wrists, her neck.

  It had been different once. When they were young, he had loved the smell of her sweat after a tennis game. It reminded him vaguely of decomposing lilacs, a fond memory from his youth of the great lilac bushes outside his bedroom window. Then there was the smell of her sleep and her waking, like damp mittens. It was her own morning smell. Even his children had smelled distinctly when they awoke. Henry of Wheaties. Carson of something earthy and sweet, like a new potato. Gretchen, whose name meant “little pearl,” had always smelled vaguely of the sea, especially when she sat on his lap as a child and he had rested his face by her barrette.

  It was impossible for Rust
y to imagine this daughter having a baby, not because she was thin and birdlike, but because the news had been delivered in a fashion that was so compulsory it exaggerated the rift that Rusty felt between himself and all his children, between himself and Judy. Years ago, he might have imagined the conversation with Gretchen in other ways. She had been his little shadow. She had been the image of his own mother, with her toothy smile and long, sloping forehead and streaky blond hair. He remembered the way Gretchen loved to ride around with him in the old cars that came in, how she would clamber around the seats for pennies, digging with her fingers between the cushions, where she might find a lady’s compact, a book of matches, a cigarette. She liked to sit up front like a grown-up, with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap.

  Nothing in his life had prepared him for his children’s mockery, for the distance they imposed on him later, as if his usefulness had expired. He had raised his children as he had been raised, guiding his boys with a firm hand and instilling in them a sense of what the world wanted from men: protection, fearlessness, devotion. Gretchen had been more Judy’s concern. She had taught Gretchen to cook and to take care of little details. Gretchen had taken these things up with ease and was, by nature, reserved and fawning. It wasn’t until she moved her room to the basement that she’d begun to slip from them. Was that even it?

  One night, he’d descended the stairs to check the furnace, only to find Gretchen in Henry’s bed and Henry in Gretchen’s. They’d swapped rooms. Rusty had shot through the roof. It set him off to see his children readjusting their worlds—cagey Henry, who loved male singers in makeup. Rusty had rousted him from Gretchen’s pink sheets and dragged him by the ear across the hall. Gretchen he had shooed back to her room. She’d been wearing Henry’s Star Wars pajamas, and Henry—well, Rusty didn’t like to think about what Henry’d had on. It still caused every muscle in his neck to spasm.