Pregnant With The Universe

The wife is unbelievably pregnant, like she has a whole universe inside her. She is like a mountain snoring beside me as I lie perfectly still, cursed as ever with insomnia. Tormented with the kind of questions produced by wakefulness, about how I came to be here, why I ever got married in the first place, why I was ever even born in the first place.

I had a violently passionate mother. Once she caught me cracking walnuts with my teeth. "You'll ruin them!" She said, her voice trembling with anguish and emotion all out of proportion to such a mundane incident. When we were traveling, if she saw a deer leap across the highway she wept. "Oh, It is so Bee-yoo-ti-ful," she sobbed. If Dad crossed her over any little thing, she flew into a violent rage, screamed and slammed doors for all the neighbors to hear. And when they made up that night and got friendly in the bedroom, she wanted all the neighbors to hear that too. My mother was violently passionate and demanded an audience for every waking moment of her existence.

It was what I disliked most about her. She wanted to tell all the neighbors about when she cleaned her kitchen or washed dishes or fed the kitty. Everything was horribly exciting to her; she wanted everybody to know about her life in excruciating detail. She used to describe all her cooking and cleaning chores: "And then I had trouble getting that last teeny bit of grime. So I got out the Brillo pads and scrubbed and scrubbed!" she said, moving her arm in a vigorous circular motion, like anybody really cared about how she scrubbed her sink.

The thing was, most people did seem to be interested. They would sit and listen for hours while she stood, performing her utterly drab stories, making dramatic gestures, weeping over her unwashed dishes, exalting over her vacuumed carpet, nearly reaching orgasm as she described feeding the kitty, her liddle kiddy-cat, Pwecious.

Puke. That's what Dad and I called the cat, refusing to call it Pwecious. It was part calico, and its fur was mostly dark gray with splotches of yellow and white in a messy pattern that bore an amazing resemblance to vomit. How did I get to thinking about this? The tired path down which your thinking wanders and the odd discoveries, buried memories you discover when you have insomnia. I haven't thought about poor old Puke for years.

* * *

I long to change my position. I carefully roll over onto my side, moving ever so slowly, but still the wife abruptly stops snoring. I hold very, very still until she sighs and rumbles, and returns to her honks and wheezes. I should demand a paternity test, because I don't think this baby is mine. I don't know who the father is, but I have my suspicions.

She met a bad end, old Puke, chewed up by the neighbor's three-legged German Shepherd. That old car-chase veteran was probably proud to still be able to run down a cat, even a rheumatic old feline like Puke. I won't go into my mother's spasms of grief over this incident. If I did, I might puke myself. I just couldn't believe that so many people could not only stand her carrying on, but could listen so avidly. Of course, if her listeners were men, I could understand, because she was a pretty little blonde thing, and they no doubt liked watching her jiggle as she performed her story, swinging her arms or twisting her hips, her voice filled with overwrought emotion.

But it wasn't just men. Women seemed fascinated as well. I wanted to say, she's talking about cleaning an oven, for God's sake! It was years before I figured it out, that people love drama, and you don't have to really say anything, just so long as you are flamboyant about it. People will listen for hours to the most boring trivia if you behave as though it is a matter of life and death, of love and passion and sex and violence. They'll listen. And I was an exceptionally odd bird because the only emotions it made me experience were boredom and nausea.

And to this day I still feel a lot of boredom and nausea when I sit in front of the TV, clicking my channel clicker. It seems my mother's spirit has infested all the cable TV channels, all those people on the talk shows yelling and screaming and performing for a delighted, hooting audience. People tell me I have a bad outlook on life, that I'm a negative person, a spoiled middle-aged brat. I say I can't help it. I was born that way.

I'd like to get up and watch a little T.V. now, but that'd wake the wife. She'd grumble, say, "What are you doing up?" I wish I were single again and could just get up and watch the damn T.V. when the spirit moves me.

I should never have married. I'll make a lousy father. People just don't interest me all that much. and it's getting worse as I get older. I would rather think about a thing than a person any day. Just the other day I was thinking about guttering. It's funny how you don't notice something like that when you look at a house, but it is always there, and you can spend a whole afternoon driving around, like I did last Saturday, and sure enough, every damn house has guttering. But you never really see it when you look at a house; you notice the windows and the doors and everything else, but not the guttering, it's like it's invisible. Now that, that's interesting.

But people are so damn boring. They are all so preoccupied with their trivia and minutia. All that tacky shit that makes up their lives. Relatives and husbands and wives and children. Sex and violence and car payments and mortgages and NASCAR. Grandpa is in a coma and Grandma has AIDS. What's on TV tonight? Where are we going to eat? It just goes on and on. I want no part of any of it. I ignore them as best as I can. I have not overheard an interesting conversation in at least 20 years, let alone had one. I hate it when people laugh. When I'm working, stocking the shelves at WalMart, I hate to hear them laughing or, worse, bellowing at their squalling brats. Then they come to me with their petty questions: Where's the toothpicks? Where's the potato chips? Can I buy liquor here on Sunday? I hate them all. Not just the customers but people in general. They should all go away. But I have to work, because I need the money . . . they should all just give me their money and go away . . .

But the wife is unbelievably pregnant. The doctor says any day, but he's been saying that for weeks. It cannot possibly be my child. I could not have possibly produced something like that, something that big. I'm a small man. Her stomach sticks out so far, and it's shaped like a football. Her navel juts out obscenely . . . Sex is out of the question and has been for some time . . . The fact of the matter is that we have not had sex for at least five years. So I am reasonably certain that the child is not mine.

It is probably my neighbor Leon. I am almost certain that she has been with Leon . . . They are always shutting themselves up in the guest bedroom, locking the door, then there are those mysterious sounds, that loud rhythmic bumping, an occasional stifled moan. What exactly are they up to in there, I would like to know. Once I timidly knocked on the door, but they ignored me. "I know what you're doing in there!" I said, but I didn't really know, or at least I wasn't sure. They were up to no good, I suspect . . .

* * *

My wife turns over in bed, and I hold very still. I was asleep without even knowing it just a second ago, drifting from my tired thoughts toward dreams of my wife and Leon. I grip the mattress tightly. I don't want her to wake up, to notice I'm awake, or she might want me to do something. She might want me to rub her back (surely the spinal column, the vertebrae are crushed from bearing that weight around by now!) Once she asked me to rub her feet because they ached and she couldn't reach them. Another time she asked me to clip her long ugly blackened toenails. I just looked at her.

Now I lie very still, holding my breath, hoping she will not awaken. She farts, then returns to her snores. I sigh. I am holding the edge of the mattress with my left hand, lying on my right side. I often fall asleep like this. It is like I have to hold on or her gravity will suck me in. She is deeply indenting the mattress, a perfect model of the way the sun bends the fabric of space-time, forcing the planets of our solar system into orbit around her like a flock of spinning children or bewildered men. I never wanted to be in orbit around her and her infernal unborn that I am almost certain does not belong to me . . . Slowly dozing off, drifting into oblivion, drifting into the black hole . . . black hole . . . time runs backward . . . The other day I heard my wife tell her mother, "Harold and I are still together, so I guess it's love, or something," she said, rolling her eyes. This is nothing like love . . . nothing like love at all . . . Women don't understand. They say they want to love the world, to mother it, but the truth is that they don't know what they want at all . . . They act like they are all grown up and we are still little boys. They act like they got it all figured out, this love stuff, but it is really what they are most confused about . . . This has never been anything about love. This has never had anything to do with love at all. I am almost certain that this unborn child is no child of mine . . .

Copyright 2002 by John Clinbrohf. Permission is granted to print single copies of this story to read or share with others. The story may not be altered in any way, and must include this copyright notice.

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