Free Playing House by Lauren Slater Page B

grateful for the layoff, a time to rest. It occurred to me, though not for the first time, that we lived in the shadow of sickness; we were both wounded, in different ways. He cannot use a screwdriver or hold a pen; I can hold a pen, for sure, but I take six pills per day. So, he was out of work, and the Dow had, at that point, started its gruesome slide. We could no longer afford our child care, which shouldn’t have mattered, given that now he was home, but how could he stay home and look for employment at the same time? Money. Money. Money. Meanwhile, inside the capsule of my uterus, this being was forming, the size of a bean, with two embossed spots inked in. We calculated—how horrible—what a second would cost us, extra years of day care, high school, college. I went to the ob-gyn and heard the heartbeat. It was going so fast, like it was anxious. I started to cry.
    And yet something was urging me onward, onward. Brute physiology. And the fact that once you have a child, abortion is never what it was. You’ve looked at all the pictures. You’ve seen how the flippers become fingers, how the iris is developed, how the webwork of the brain gets laid down like filaments of the palest pink. When you’re twenty, you can pluck it from you rather carelessly, but when you’re thirty, when you’re forty, you know just what the embryonic blob becomes.
    “Maybe I should just stay home,” he said to me. “And be a house husband.”
    “You want to live off my writing,” I said, my voice flat, exhausted. “I’d have to publish hundreds of pieces per year.”
    “You could do it,” he said, his voice all jubilant. “You’re really prolific. You’re productive.”
    “Fuck you,” I said. “I am not a machine. Maybe I don’t want to write magazine pieces for the rest of my life. Maybe I want to write fairy tales.”
    “That won’t put bread in our basket,” he said, still maddeningly jovial.
    “You want a second kid,” I said, “then get off your ass and drive a UPS truck if you have to.”
    Our daughter looked at us, back and forth, back and forth, like she was at a tennis match.
    “I don’t want a second child,” she said.
    “You don’t want a brother or a sister?” I said.
    “No,” she said. “I want a fox.”
    The actual hard-core nausea started, and the accompanying fatigue. At five p.m., I was in bed, dragged down, each nap a small, delectable death. In my first pregnancy, this had been doable, as there was no child to care for. Now, however, I had a child to care for, and I wasn’t doing it well. My psychopharmacologist said, “This probably isn’t such a great idea, what with your history and all.” After that, my husband said, “You know, we don’t need to go through with this now. I read about a woman who had a second when she was sixty-three.”
    Another friend said, “You could always adopt.”
    “Now or never,” I said to my husband, because the baby was in me. In me! “You better get a job.”
    To his credit, he looked and looked. He looked panicked. We hired temporary child care so I could earn and he could look. We began to see ahead of us a long life of serious toil, just to make ends meet. When we were fifty-three, we’d be scratching the bottom of our savings to pay for college. It wasn’t just the money. It was what the money represented, a life where you squeeze yourself out to the last drop, husked by a system that demands cash in exchange for basic needs, like health care, like education. My friend Elizabeth said, regarding money, “I’m having a second. I just figure there’ll be a way to do it,” and of course she was right. There’s always a way to do it. But at what cost? And why rock the boat, especially when it’s rickety? And, yet, to not rock the boat, to live a life only on the safe side . . . Risk and benefit. Benefit and risk. These are hard to assess even when your thinking is clear. My thinking grew muddied. The clock on the bedside table sounded