to work during her shift, taking her place behind the counter and chipping at the rock-hard ice cream while she was left sponging tables that were already perfectly clean. Since then she’d been loading up on Advil, doing her own scooping, and assuring him she felt fine, never better.
“‘Fine?’” he’d said last night after dinner. “I don’t think ‘fine’ is good enough. I want you to feel magnificent.”
“Fine is good, David. Most people wish they felt fine. Fine is—fine.” She nodded at him brightly. His broad face wore an eager expression, right at the brink of enjoyment.
“I want you to feel perfect,” he said.
“I don’t think I could take the pressure.”
He had pulled her onto his lap, and she leaned against his heavy arms, even though the embrace was sticky in the room’s heat. “Well, ‘fine’ still isn’t good enough,” he said, shaking her long hair out of its braid. “We’re going to have to do something about that.”
What he wanted her to feel was pregnant. He had brought up the subject two months before, pointing out that they had been married five years, and he was coming into some money from his father, and they had savings. Why wait? Cecilia couldn’t think of any reason, and she was happy to throw away the condoms and tubes of Conceptrol that slid around in their bedside drawer. But she hadn’t been prepared for David’s enthusiasm. Not only did he initiate sex every night, until Cecilia heard herself sighing as soon as the dinner dishes were done, but he turned nosy, asking when exactly her latest period had started and marking the kitchen calendar with a black dot that she could see from across the room. He talked about cervical mucus. Sharply, and more than once, she warned him that he’d better calm down. He brushed his hands across her breasts and said he hadn’t been so excited since she’d let him court her, a pretty piece of talking that made her blush and relent.
David, she reminded herself, was a good-hearted man, as uncomplicated as water. His round, soft body cushioned her knobby joints, his beard scrubbed genially at her face, and his gentle nature soothed her daily onslaught of worries, her sense that she had never quite done enough. Cecilia knew she had fallen in love with him in large part for his ability to ease her fretful soul. “Everything will be all right. Shh, now,” he said night after night. Although she never believed him, she knew he believed himself, which sometimes was enough to make her relax.
But lately his easy faith only made her nervous. She felt like a high-strung dog, alert to every sound or shift in the wind, while cheerful, oblivious David strode beside her. When he talked about fitting a crib into the bedroom with them or thought up baby names—“Wolfgang,” he suggested, trying to please her, “Wolfgang Ludwig Johann Sebastian”—she answered by not answering, chattering about the store, asking him about his tomato plants, complaining, like everybody, about the heat. He looked at her with a puzzled disappointment that made her heart hurt. Now of all times they should be sharing a dreamy, sweet dialogue. But she couldn’t control her edgy spirit. She wanted a baby well enough; she just didn’t want it as much as he did. She had never wanted anything as much as he, so very suddenly, wanted this baby.
Sandy finished her étude—half whisper, half hee-haw. “Again,” Cecilia said.
“I bet you don’t really want to listen to this.”
“Keep playing the notes. It’s always hard at first to find the music.”
“This”—Sandy held the violin by the neck and wagged it in front of her—“isn’t music. When is it going to get better?”
“Sandy, I don’t know. There’s no timetable. You do your best and keep trying. Or else just quit and go watch TV.”
“You’re not very encouraging.”
“You’re not the first one to tell me,” Cecilia said, surprised when she got a grin out of the girl. It was Sandy’s bad luck to catch Cecilia when she was worrying about her husband, a man who would have cheerfully told Sandy to play what she was good at, not what she loved. Trained as a botanist, he believed in practical goals: If corn didn’t thrive, plant beans. If tobacco failed, try berries. So Cecilia studied her husband and tried to figure out what harvest he had missed, that he was so ready to plant a baby in its place.
She had come up with no answer yet. She should, she knew, bring the issue up at Life Ties, but every time the thought occurred she let it slide away again. She wasn’t ready for the glare of interest, the advice on everything from baby-raising methods to her and David’s sexual positions, the frank stares that would fix, week after week, on her meager belly. The group’s basic rule was members could bring their problems to meetings, not that they had to. Cecilia clung to the distinction.
Normally, so long as she stayed safely out of the fray, Cecilia liked Life Ties. The group was loosely allied with a Unitarian church that half of El Campo more or less attended for its good youth group and monthly wine-and-soup suppers. One of the church’s many outreach organizations, Life Ties was a support group for married couples, meeting weekly in the church’s fellowship hall and using the church’s Xerox machine for its mailings. Dimly based on AA, the group had rules and goals and slogans, but mostly the meetings were just talk: disappointments, surprises, betrayals, the occasional triumph. People talked, and then the others gave feedback. Somehow, amazingly, the talking helped. Husbands and wives discussed and revised and recommitted themselves to their marriages. They explored their difficulties. They found new solutions. “Cheaper than divorce,” somebody always said. “The weekly news,” somebody else would add.
The group met on Sunday nights, sometimes twenty people or more, sometimes only six. All the Natural High partners came at least sometimes. Vivy and Sam often slid in late. Other couples showed up with a rough regularity, new members appearing when old ones decided they’d had enough.
The couples Cecilia liked best had been long married. They told stories of domestic savagery both ornate and inventive. By their standards Cecilia and David’s five years of marriage, so considerate, so mannerly, hardly constituted a marriage at all. In five years Cecilia had never had an affair, never squirreled away money from the checking account or hit David, never—to take a recent example from a doctor’s wife—spread resonant rumors about his personal hygiene until patients refused to shake his hand.
Other people stole, they whispered, they destroyed. Their lives struck Cecilia as remarkably full of options. Sometimes, after hearing about slashed upholstery and mangled hard drives, Cecilia felt abashed at the puniness of her own actions. Then David would speak up with reassuring clarity about sharing, communication, and the importance of a united effort, and Cecilia would sit up straight again. The meetings renewed her pride in him, an emotion she suspected would slip away if she didn’t have Life Ties to remind her of it.
Lately, he had been listening to the happy couples, the joyful ones who sailed together through tribulations. At home he quoted them, his face alight with glaring hope. Cecilia couldn’t help herself—the more David talked about uplift, the harder she listened to the squabbling couples, the ones going over and over some worn-out patch of discord. She liked the peculiar self-possession of people who could quarrel weekly and with heat about who deserved the good parking space beside the house. The night a couple married twenty years came into the meeting already growling, Cecilia made sure to sit close, so she could hear.
“You want that boat,” said the man. “Don’t say you don’t.”
“I want a life,” snapped the woman. “I want to come home at six o’clock and take off my shoes.”
“You have to sacrifice a little to get
