Free It by Stephen King Page B

been fired again.
    And in the middle of this chatty—and often catty—outpouring, in the middle of a paragraph, apropos of nothing which had gone before or which came after, Ruth Blum had casually asked the Dreaded Question: “So when are you and Stan going to make us grandparents? We’re all ready to start spoiling him (or her) rotten. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Patsy, we’re not getting any younger.” And then on to the Bruckner girl from down the block who had been sent home from school because she was wearing no bra and a blouse that you could see right through.
    Feeling low and homesick for their old place in Traynor, feelingunsure and more than a little afraid of what might be ahead, Patty had gone into what was to become their bedroom and had lain down upon the mattress (the box spring was still out in the garage, and the mattress, lying all by itself on the big carpetless floor, looked like an artifact cast up on a strange yellow beach). She put her head in her arms and lay there weeping for nearly twenty minutes. She supposed that cry had been coming anyway. Her mother’s letter had just brought it on sooner, the way dust hurries the tickle in your nose into a sneeze.
    Stanley wanted kids. She wanted kids. They were as compatible on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Allen’s films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it—it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. Someday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize the thought; like the word pornographic, it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.
    In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. “We want to know if there is something wrong,” Stanley said, “and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is.”
    They took the tests. They showed that Stanley’s sperm was perky, that Patty’s eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.
    Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways similar to sexual impotency—the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.
    Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.
    â€œI never do,” he said.
    â€œDo what?”
    â€œThink of procreation during.”
    She began to giggle, even though she was by