(Continued from a previous page. Click here.) They wouldn't let us come in to the clinic yet. She wasn't far enough along. We had to wait almost two weeks to have it done. Seven and a half weeks is the magic number, for all you peckerheads taking notes. Anything less, it's a speck of unremovable dust. Lynn ate saltines before she got out of bed every day, and I brought her a cold glass of club soda. Our friend Tina taught her that. I'd walk in, hand her the saltines, and sit and look at this girl I've been sleeping next to for months and months--five months by then and I hated her. She was sick now, and I was sick of her, I hated her little puffy knocked-up ass, she looked like a worried old hag, and out of nowhere I'm just not so sure of anything. Why I all of a sudden don't love her. Because there's something about her that I'm definitely not too sure about. What if she turns into her mother? Celia's a joke. They say a pregnant woman looks radiant. Lynn went around for two weeks, agitated and angry and with an upset stomach, but she really did look radiant--it was like a cosmetics expert had done something to her face. Her cheeks were flushed all day, and her eyes were as bright as green candy. I can't explain the difference. I kept catching myself staring. For those two weeks she was nauseous and pissed off. Added to that, I was still in training for my job, we were not married or engaged or anything, and Lynn really didn't know, ha-ha, was she maybe ready to be a mother? Maybe she wasn't and maybe she was. Is twenty-two too young? She toyed with the idea while lolling around in the bath, conditioning her hair. Well, I knew. I'm sure. Please ask me. Out the window now the sun is setting. It's the summer of 1995. I see Lynn is crouched between the vegetables, picking peas and pulling up weeds. This garden is a pretty thought--it's the nicest thing I've ever done. We have snap peas growing along one row. I read in the paper that they like to climb, so I built a trellis beside the row, crisscross lattice-wood slats, about two feet tall. I painted it white. We have eggplants, squash, tomatoes, and yellow flowers, and next year we'll plant tubers. When I hate Lynn, or when I can't stand to look at her or be near her, when I feel putrid, when I wish God would just erase me, I look at the garden. When she gets angry or yells about something terrible I did and we're fighting, I look out the window at that thing we made, the garden, at the lawn when it's been mowed and raked and looks like a putting green, cool and flat and smells sweet. You want to lie down on it and tear the grass up with your hands. Sometimes I think I'm just about ready to kil1 her. How come I never do what I'm supposed to do? How come everything I do is such a fucking disaster? Doesn't anybody get what they want? And that line of hers about how she might want to have it. She came out of the bath tub with a towel on her head, fiuffing her hair. "Honey," she said. She never called me "Honey" before in her life. "Honey, I've been thinking about our child." I could feel all the blood draining from my head. White flecks on the edges of my vision. There was a narrow window of opportunity there, before I calmed myself, where different pictures whizzed into my mind. Space travel, that sort of thing. I told her, You have it alone, honey darling, in your own purple dream world--I'll be in Australia by the time the thing comes out. There's the immense Colorado sky, there's the grass, there's the clothes on the line, fruit hanging ripe in the trees, the smell of wet cut grass. The land ripping out flat to the Mississippi with the sun leering on top in every direction. And you're standing above it, a million miles from bumper-to-bumper commuter-nightmare New York. You're not there anymore, though, you're here, at the foot of the Rockies, cow-town college town on the American prairie. Great American steer farm. Steroid-fat cows. Transistor radios in barns, cows chewing all night long. There were five of us in the room during the procedure: the doctor, her assistant, the hand-holder, me, and, of course, Lynn. She was the star. This was her show. Then it would finally be over. The hand-holder was a therapist, trained in female personal crisis. She was never more than a foot from Lynn throughout that long day. The staff was ready to go. A stainless-steel machine is used by the doctor to vacuum it out, and the doctor needed Lynn's O.K. to begin. The whole thing was supposed to take five minutes. Lynn got weepy from nerves, and we all waited while she collected herself. Everyone was anxious to get on with it. I bet Lynn was, too. I held her hand and kissed it; she wasn't even looking at me, she stared up at some poster on the ceiling. The sound, the way she cried, choking some, the way you do when you're sobbing lying on your back, so the spit runs down your throat, swallowing, laughing underneath the crying for how absurd the scene was--even Lynn could see it--lying there with her legs propped up in the air, all these fucking people around her holding her hands and her knees and her privates, watching her like she was--ha-ha!--about to give birth (sorry). Boo-hoo. But in my mind I keep coming back to that sound, not loud, not shrill, that crying, it was almost a noise an animal would make. How much trouble Lynn was having even crying right then, without strangling on her own spit. Is there a way to describe how much I wanted to get the fuck out of there? I wanted to shout, God of New York, turn off that sound, get me out of this room before I'm seared and split open, before I develop breasts myself. The other half of my brain, though, recorded her voice for all time. "You're O.K.," Lynn said to nobody, to herself. "You're O.K." She'd planned to get through it without tears. Then it was quiet and she told the doctor to go ahead, and the doctor nodded to her assistant. The assistant turned on the machine, and the machine made a sound like any vacuum. Lynn is outside, bent over the row of peas. The chicken is sitting over there in the pan. I guess it's ready to bake. She put garlic, butter, lime juice, chili powder, chopped nuts, oranges, cloves, parsley, coriander, half a banana, and paprika on it. What's left? Jean Nate? A cigar up the butt? The rice is cooking away in a pot. The chicken sits there like a drag queen, waiting to get roasted. When it was over, Lynn went into another room and fell asleep. The therapist came over and said, "You were so caring today. Guys aren't usually so caring." I nodded. The woman looked at me sweetly. I guess I was. So what. Maybe it wasn't the norm for her. Or was she just looking for a tip? My voice, though, was so much deeper than everybody else's in the room. Whatever I said that day came out sounding like a frog croak. Like a belch. My voice was unnaturally deep. I nodded as much as possible. Other than an arrest for drunk driving in college, it was the most nodding I'd ever done in one five-hour stretch. "What are you doing?" I yell to Lynn out the window. She's bent over the rosebush. Her head is down and her shoulders are rounded, as though she's concentrating on something small. Lynn says, "There are beetles on the roses." I look over at the roasting pan again. "Do we cook this thing or what? I'm getting hungry. What temperature do you set it at?" No answer. She's busy with the roses. "Lynn, you didn't turn the oven on. I'm going to come out there and pull you in by your hair." Her hair is hanging around her face. She's looking down. "Relax," she says. "The oven is on. What time is it?" I can feel myself getting annoyed, so I take ten deep breaths, counting the numbers slowly, saying the word relax as I breathe out. "Damn it, Lynn, I can't hear you." She looks up finally. "It has to cook for an hour," she says. "And you have to move the rack." The pan is heavier than I thought. She said move the rack. What does that mean, up or down? I grab it and then drop it, hot rack and then the roasting pan, too, onto the oven door. "Fuck!" "What's going on?" she says. "The rack is on fire." "Of course it is, Jack, it's three hundred and fifty degrees in there. Did you burn yourself? Better put cold water on it." I stand over the sink and let the water run on my fingers. There's a welt on my palm. I am a moron. She says, "Didn't you ever hear of an oven mitt?" Man. My fucking hand. Did I ever hear of an oven mitt? What is that, sarcasm? She says, "Do you want to try something weird?" Out the window I see her looking up toward me, her face flushed from leaning over for so long. "Should we put dandelions in the salad? Look at this," she says, clutching a bunch of dandelions from our lawn in a bouquet. "Mexicans kill for these, the little leaves," she says. "And they fry the flowers." I never ate dandelions before. And who cares. "Is that too weird?" she says. "Hey, yeah," I say, drying my burned hand gingerly on my T-shirt. "Momma had a baby and the head popped off." When I was a kid, we used to pick a dandelion and say this when we flicked the head off the stem. The water in the rice pot foams over the sides. "Excuse me, Momma didn't have a baby and the head popped off," I say, correcting myself. I walk over and grab a towel, move the rack down, push the chicken in, and close the oven. The door goes sping against the metal. It's 7:02. Nothing comes to mind. Outside she looks up at the window. "Is that a joke?" she says. At this angle the sun cuts right through the house. It's orange, purple, rose-colored light, blasting right through the house and spilling against everything. "Fuck you," she says. It's about time somebody said it. I can hear the familiar sound of it ringing in the background. "You can never keep anything to yourself," she says. "What?" I say. "In your head," she says, standing at the doorway. "Forget it." Over in the rice pot, there isn't any water left. So the bottom is cooking way too fast. It's, like, black. I use a coffee cup and dump some water in. It sizzles, a cloud of steam comes up. One more cup of water. The rice starts cooking again. My eyes are tearing. In a few seconds the whole wet mess is bubbling away. I feel like I scorched my face. Lynn's basket is overflowing with greenery and edible dandelions. "Get out of my way," she says. "You are an animal." "I'm sorry. Why did I say that? Is it too late to take it back?" "What's wrong with you?" she says. Lynn goes over to the oven with a dish towel and slides the roasting pan out. She carries it past me, not even hot yet, out the back door, and I hear it go gong against the metal basement doors. I step up to the window. The chicken's in the grass, onions, carrots, sliced oranges--the whole thing. Lynn is standing in front of me now. The dish towel is wound around her hand. "Cool," I say. "How symbolic." She says, "I think we need therapists." "What can I say? I'm sorry," I tell her. "Why don't you get down on your knees." I say, "I will if you want." No one moves. "You're mad at me," she says. "How can you be mad at me?" "I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. It's my fault." She shakes her head, staring at me. "Now what?" "I'm too hungry," I say. "I can't make any big decisions. "What the hell happened to your face?" she says. Outside, I pick up the roasting pan out of a pile of leaves. Lynn comes up beside me and puts the chicken back in it, and we shovel up the vegetables and carry everything over to the garbage and throw it all away, even the cracked enamel pot. Whiskey is already there at the fence, meowing and sniffing around. "Go on, Whiskey," I say. "Not for you." "Make sure the lid's on tight," she says to me. "I don't want to clean this up a second time from some raccoon." Let's say, for the sake of something, that I never loved her, that what we have here is a housing arrangement, with scenes of nude touching, that we joined for this comfort, that it's missing some key element of normal love. It's not normal, it's more like high-school love, or freshman-year-in-college kind of love, the kind you're glad to stick with as long as it doesn't interfere, as long as it doesn t start ruining your life. The very, very flawed kind. That's my idea of love, actually, those endless first two weeks, early on, when all you care about is love. We get a pizza. We pay the man. We eat the salad she picked and lie on the rug in the living room, eating pizza, watching TV, together on the floor. We have no furniture--we aren't there yet. The vibe between us is two people very tired and in shock, but amiable. I put some cream on my face. The welt on my hand throbs. I'd rather have pizza anyway; chicken sucks. I love her. Who else would accept me in this condition? I should say I'll make dinner tomorrow night. "I can make dinner tomorrow night." "You gonna make some chicken?" she says. "White Christmas lasagna," I say. "With spinach and salad and bread." "Sounds good," she says. "Move over," sliding toward me. She slings her leg over both of mine, sticking her face in my neck. "This way," she says, and I move to accommodate her. I can feel Lynn's warm, clean breath on my skin. What a feeling, from one person to another. "I don't understand anything," she says. Her eyes close. Her breath slows. Lynn gets up from beside me and takes the dinner plates with her. I must be insane. She gives me what I need, and I love her. Hollow but true. I have to remember these things, about her and about the chicken in the grass--is that how it works? Perfect. Stupid. Shared. Turn off the TV now. Turn off the lights. --This story originally appeared in The New Yorker
		Copyright © 2000 by Matthew Klam. Used by permission of the author.