like it.”
The woman places a foil pie plate in front of Alma. There is newspaper over the tablecloth, Alma sees, and paint and silk flowers and little wooden hearts and snowmen scattered here and there in plastic bowls. The singing woman pours smooth, white plaster of Paris out of her Tupperware and into Alma’s pie plate, wiping it clean with a Popsicle stick.
The plaster of Paris possesses a beautiful, creamy texture. One of the residents has spread it all over the tablecloth. Another has some in her hair. The woman in white has started a second song. Or perhaps she is singing the first song again,Alma cannot be sure.
Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba,
she sings.
Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe.
Alma raises her left hand. The plaster is wet and waiting. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
She thinks: I had somebody. But he left me here all by myself.
Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba. Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe,
sings the woman.
Alma sinks her hand into the plaster.
Procreate, Generate
Imogene is tiny, all-white. Spun-sugar hair, pale forehead, chalky arms. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Milk Princess. A black spiderweb is tattooed on her left biceps. She is a resource allocation manager for Cyclops Engineering in Laramie, Wyoming.
Herb is medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his forearms. He teaches molecular phylogeny to undergraduates. He and Imogene live in a single-story brick-and-cedar on five acres fifteen miles from town. Sage, most of it is, and cheatgrass, but they have a few cottonwoods in a dry creekbed, and a graveyard of abandoned tires Herb is trying to clear, and whole bevies of quail that sometimes sprint across the driveway in the early morning. Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full.
In September of 2002, Imogene swallows her last birth control tablet and she and Herb go out to the driveway so she can crush the empty pill container with the flat edge of the wood maul. This excites Herb: the shards of plastic in the gravel, the taut cords in Imogene’s throat. He has been thinking about children all the time lately; he imagines himself coming home from class to find offspring on all the furniture.
Over the next thirty mornings Herb and Imogene have sex twenty times. Each time, afterward, Imogene tilts her hips toward the ceiling and shuts her eyes and tries to imagine it as Herb described: vast schools of his sperm streaming through her cervix, crossing her uterus, scaling her fallopian tubes. In her imagination their chromosomes stitch themselves together with the smallest imaginable sound: two teeth in a zipper locking.
Then: sun at the windows. Herb makes toast. A zygote like a tiny question mark drifts into her womb.
Nothing happens. One month, one period. Two months, two periods. After four months, on New Year’s Eve, wind hurling sleet across the driveway, Herb cries a bit.
“I’m just getting the pill out of my system,” Imogene says. “This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.”
Then it’s 2003. Imogene begins to notice pregnant women everywhere. They clamber out of minivans at the Loaf ’N Jug; they hunker in Walmart aisles holding infant-sized pajamas to the light. A pregnant repairwoman services the office copier; a pregnant client spills orange juice in the conference room. What defects does Imogene have that these women do not?
She reads on the internet that it takes couples, on average,one year to get pregnant. So. No problem. Plenty of time. She is only thirty-three years old, after all. Thirty-four in March.
At Herb’s prompting, Imogene begins sticking a thermometer in her mouth every morning when she wakes
The woman places a foil pie plate in front of Alma. There is newspaper over the tablecloth, Alma sees, and paint and silk flowers and little wooden hearts and snowmen scattered here and there in plastic bowls. The singing woman pours smooth, white plaster of Paris out of her Tupperware and into Alma’s pie plate, wiping it clean with a Popsicle stick.
The plaster of Paris possesses a beautiful, creamy texture. One of the residents has spread it all over the tablecloth. Another has some in her hair. The woman in white has started a second song. Or perhaps she is singing the first song again,Alma cannot be sure.
Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba,
she sings.
Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe.
Alma raises her left hand. The plaster is wet and waiting. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
She thinks: I had somebody. But he left me here all by myself.
Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba. Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe,
sings the woman.
Alma sinks her hand into the plaster.
Procreate, Generate
Imogene is tiny, all-white. Spun-sugar hair, pale forehead, chalky arms. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Milk Princess. A black spiderweb is tattooed on her left biceps. She is a resource allocation manager for Cyclops Engineering in Laramie, Wyoming.
Herb is medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his forearms. He teaches molecular phylogeny to undergraduates. He and Imogene live in a single-story brick-and-cedar on five acres fifteen miles from town. Sage, most of it is, and cheatgrass, but they have a few cottonwoods in a dry creekbed, and a graveyard of abandoned tires Herb is trying to clear, and whole bevies of quail that sometimes sprint across the driveway in the early morning. Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full.
In September of 2002, Imogene swallows her last birth control tablet and she and Herb go out to the driveway so she can crush the empty pill container with the flat edge of the wood maul. This excites Herb: the shards of plastic in the gravel, the taut cords in Imogene’s throat. He has been thinking about children all the time lately; he imagines himself coming home from class to find offspring on all the furniture.
Over the next thirty mornings Herb and Imogene have sex twenty times. Each time, afterward, Imogene tilts her hips toward the ceiling and shuts her eyes and tries to imagine it as Herb described: vast schools of his sperm streaming through her cervix, crossing her uterus, scaling her fallopian tubes. In her imagination their chromosomes stitch themselves together with the smallest imaginable sound: two teeth in a zipper locking.
Then: sun at the windows. Herb makes toast. A zygote like a tiny question mark drifts into her womb.
Nothing happens. One month, one period. Two months, two periods. After four months, on New Year’s Eve, wind hurling sleet across the driveway, Herb cries a bit.
“I’m just getting the pill out of my system,” Imogene says. “This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.”
Then it’s 2003. Imogene begins to notice pregnant women everywhere. They clamber out of minivans at the Loaf ’N Jug; they hunker in Walmart aisles holding infant-sized pajamas to the light. A pregnant repairwoman services the office copier; a pregnant client spills orange juice in the conference room. What defects does Imogene have that these women do not?
She reads on the internet that it takes couples, on average,one year to get pregnant. So. No problem. Plenty of time. She is only thirty-three years old, after all. Thirty-four in March.
At Herb’s prompting, Imogene begins sticking a thermometer in her mouth every morning when she wakes
Similar Books
