The first thing I do is stare at the pee stick and cry and not call Robert. I don’t know why. I try to call Annie, but she’s in Colombia meeting her fiancé’s family, and her cell doesn’t really work down there. I leave her a voice mail that she probably won’t get for a month. Then I go to the bookstore. I spend an hour walking the aisles, trying to calm down, and end up picking out an atlas and a book called Where in the World: The Complete Geography Handbook to Help You Win Again and Again. I also get a book on American History, because it has a pretty cover, and What to Expect When You’re Expecting, because I feel like I should. I don’t know that much about having a baby, or about anything else, which is what puts me in the bookstore in the first place. In high school, I was usually too busy cutting class and riding around in Eric Garcia’s Supra to learn whatever it was they were trying to teach us. So I know about the branches of government, but I’m not really sure how they work. I know the Spanish-American War happened, but I have no idea when. And I feel like I don’t know where anything is. If I look at a map of the United States, I can find Florida, Texas, California. The big ones. But if you ask me about South Dakota, all I know is that it’s at the top somewhere. None of this was ever a problem before, but sitting there looking at that pee stick, it hit me: if I was going to have to explain the world to someone else, it was a huge problem. I had nine months to learn everything. More like eight, really.
I get home from the bookstore, order a pizza, and spend the evening half-watching home renovation shows and flipping through the books. I’m on history when Robert calls. I almost answer the phone, but then I just let it go to voicemail. I tell myself it’s okay because I’ll see him at work tomorrow anyway. He delivers for Deer Park, and every Monday he comes in with two huge bottles for the watercoolers. You wouldn’t believe how much water a dermatologist’s office goes through. I listen to his message—he asks me where I am, what I’m doing, why I’m not picking up. I glance down at A History of the United States and Its People open on my lap and wonder if tomorrow he’ll somehow be able to tell just by looking at me.
At work the next morning, we’re slammed. Sandra’s on vacation, and Dr. Peña’s daughter, Mari, is in for the week, covering. She accidentally schedules two work-ins and a new patient before lunch, and we end up an hour behind, which is fine, because it keeps me from worrying about seeing Robert. Ever since I took the test—even ever since I bought it—I’ve been feeling like I’m not that sure about dating him anymore. I try not to think about any of this, just to focus on helping Mari get the patients in and out as quickly as possible so we can actually have a lunch break. She’s really fast on the computer, so that’s good, especially when we get three or four people lined up at the desk, all needing follow-up appointments.
Working for her mother is how Mari makes money. She apparently gets some kind of allowance for doing chores around the house, but she’s too busy with school to have a real job, even in the summer. She’s supposed to be some kind of genius. She’s been going to camps and special programs all over the state for the past three years, and she’s going to Grinnell for college in the fall. When I asked her where that was, she said, “It’s in Iowa. You’ve never heard of it?” and I felt stupid, even though I’m pretty sure it’s not that famous. Dr. Peña’s got another kid, who’s in college in Tallahassee, but a little more normal. She wears low-cut shirts and talks about guys and makeup. Last time I saw her she had on this necklace with a yellow stone in it. She said she got it in Australia on study abroad. “We went on an archaeological dig and found ancient stoneware,” she said, and I pictured her in little khaki shorts with one of those safari hats on, the yellow stone around her neck sparkling in the sun.
My parents never pushed us to go to college. They pushed us to get jobs. I did my associate’s at Miami Dade, but so did everybody else from my class. It was like thirteenth grade. I was going to go on for my bachelor’s, maybe in psychology—I liked the Abnormal Psych class I took—but first I had to save up money for tuition. I knew I couldn’t ask my parents. My dad’s optical shop had been losing money, and the salon where my mom did nails had cut her hours. They were doing all they could just to keep up with the bills. My plan was to take a semester off to save up and then start. That was six years ago.
It’s almost lunchtime, and I’m on the phone with Blue Cross, trying to figure out coverage on a microdermabrasion, when Robert walks in with our two bottles of water, one over each shoulder, like sandbags. “Milkman,” he calls as he comes through the door. He says this every week.
I ignore him and read off the diagnosis code to the Blue Cross guy on the phone. He puts me on hold so he can go check with his supervisor to make sure it’s right.
Robert talks to Mari while he replaces the water behind the desk. Then he goes into the waiting room to replace the one out there. When he’s done, I slide back the frosted glass window and put the Blue Cross call on speaker so I can hear if the guy picks back up.
“Hey,” I say, hoping I sound normal.
“I called you last night. Did you get my message?”
I touch my stomach for a second but pull my hand back right away. “Yeah, I got it this morning. I went to bed early. So how’d you do?” Robert’s in a car-racing club, and last night was a try-out for a special training program with professionals.
“I came in fifth. It was amazing. You should have seen.”
“Awesome,” I say, and try to mean it.
“I was behind for the whole race and then right at the end—you know the guy with the white Porsche?” He doesn’t even wait for me to answer, just keeps going with the story, something about drafting behind the Porsche and flooring it in the last lap. I’m barely listening. The words I’m pregnant keep floating around in my head, and all I can think about is what he’s going to say when he finds out—whether he’ll freak or be mad or what. Maybe he’ll think it’s my fault. I went off birth control a couple months ago because I got this skin discoloration on my face that Dr. Peña told me was because of the pill. I kept telling Robert that we needed to buy some condoms, but then we never did.
He stops talking, and I realize I have no idea what he’s been saying. I take a chance and say, “So you beat the Porsche guy?”
“No. He got me by half a second.”
“Did you get a good time, at least?”
He laughs at me. “Baby, you make a good time. I made 9:26. It’s my best yet.”
“So what does that mean? You qualified for the program?”
“Hell yeah I did. You gotta come see me train with the pro. It’s gonna be so cool. You could just come for like an hour.” He’d asked me to go last night. I used to go a lot back when we first met, but it was always so loud and boring—just a bunch of guys driving in circles.
“Let me see what’s going on,” I say. “Do I have to tell you now?”
“No, but they’re closing it to the public, so I need to get you a pass. I think we’re gonna train with a guy who was in the Sprint Cup last year.”
I look at the phone. The elevator music from the call on hold is still going, and I catch myself wishing the Blue Cross guy would come back on. “Great,” I say.
“So you want to go to lunch? I want to go to Bennigan’s.”
I don’t want to go to lunch with him. I sort of don’t want to go anywhere with him. “I can’t,” I lie. “We’re having a lunch meeting.” I look down at my desk, then back up at him. “Sorry.”
“Oh man,” he says, and now I see that his eyes are bloodshot, which means he smoked up sometime this morning. I keep telling him he better be careful with that shit, that he’ll lose his job if they smell it on him, but he swears he’ll be fine. The fact that he gets high at work doesn’t exactly make him excellent father material. I mean, I smoke with him at night sometimes, but I never smoke at work. It’s my one rule. Now I’ll have to quit altogether.
“You can still go to Bennigan’s without me,” I tell him.
“I don’t want to. Try to get out of it. Say you have to do something.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” He raises his voice a little, and a woman in the waiting room looks up from her magazine.
“She wants to talk about billing, and I have to be there.”
He shakes his head. He’s pissed. “Alright,” he says. “Whatever. But call me later. You still coming over tonight?”
“I want to go to the gym after work, but I’ll come over after that.”
“Good,” he says, and gets a little happier. “We can do those ribs on the grill. And I got that new Clint Eastwood.” Robert will watch anything. Action movies, classics, even documentaries. He doesn’t care. He just likes watching movies.
“Cool,” I say. I hate Clint Eastwood.
“Okay. I gotta go. I’ll see you tonight,” he says, and right when he leaves, the guy at Blue Cross picks up.
I sit at my desk and eat a turkey sandwich from the deli next door and look up Florida in the atlas. I’ve decided to start with geography— you have to know where things are before you can learn what happened there. I don’t really know where to begin, so I just turn to the section on Miami and look at all the different areas of the city: Kendall, where I live now, and Little Havana, where we lived with my aunt and uncle when we first came from Cuba. Eventually my parents bought the house in Westchester. I moved out two years ago, after my ex-boyfriend came back from the Army. My parents didn’t want me to leave, but I told them it was time—I was twenty-six years old, and Manny and I were talking about moving in together. They didn’t care. Twenty-six in Cuban years is like fifteen in American years. And moving in isn’t the same as getting married. I can’t imagine what my parents are going to say when I tell them I’m pregnant. Actually, I can. My mother will probably call me an idiot and then cry for a long time, and my father will lock himself in the bedroom and refuse to talk to me. This is exactly what happened when I told them I was moving out. They only started treating me like their daughter again when they saw what a wreck I was after Manny reenlisted. He ended up in Hawaii, and I ended up realizing what a dumbass I’d been, waiting around for him to decide he loved me enough after five years of dating to do something about it. Now I live alone in one side of a duplex that I rent at a reduced rate from my uncle, who’s using it as a tax shelter. I eat dinner with my parents a couple times a month, and my mom comes by sometimes to help me hang curtains or to bring me a Tupperware of leftover carne con papas.
She likes my apartment, keeps telling me I should be an interior designer because of how well I decorated it. I tell her I’m just lucky, good at spotting things. I’m always going to garage sales and thrift stores looking for bargains. I got my sofa at the Salvation Army for forty bucks and re-covered it myself. I found my bed frame on the side of the road one night on the way home from work. My brother came and got it for me. He loaded it in the back of his truck and drove it to my place, and the next weekend I painted it mustard and draped this Middle Eastern–looking scarf that Manny gave me around it.
I look up Illinois in the atlas. Robert moved to Miami in fifth grade, but he was born in Chicago. The atlas talks about the location and depth of the Great Lakes, says they contain six quadrillion gallons of water. I didn’t even know “quadrillion” was a word. I also didn’t know there was a town in Illinois called Paris. And one called Normal. Out of nowhere, I imagine myself explaining all of this to a little boy—for some reason I picture it a boy—with my hair, which is black and curly, and Robert’s eyes, which are greenish-gray. And he’s got Robert’s hands: small with flat, wide fingernails. I imagine telling this kid that some of the lakes are over 200 meters deep and that Lake Michigan is in Chicago and so big it looks like an ocean. It’s so big you can’t see the other side, I’ll tell him. Later on, when he gets to that stuff in school, he’ll be able to answer all the teacher’s questions. He’ll be the smartest kid in class.
I guess Robert could be the one to tell him all of this, but I’m not sure how much of it he knows. He’s never talked about going to the lake when he was a kid, which is weird because he loves the water. He and his roommate, Flaco, tell stories about how in high school they used to skip and go to the beach all the time. They’ve been friends since ninth grade, when Flaco supposedly weighed 110 pounds. Now he’s pushing 250. He’s the one who got Robert into racing. He’s a mechanic, and he wants to work for NASCAR one day. Big dreams. Robert doesn’t really have any big dreams that I know of. He talks about owning his own business, but he never says what kind of business it would be. I think he just wants to be able to wake up whenever he wants and take breaks whenever he wants and get high without having to worry about getting caught.
He likes to leave me notes on my car while I’m at work. The day after our first date, I found a Deer Park invoice underneath my windshield wiper. It said, “What are you wearing?” I was surprised how neat his handwriting was, almost girlish. Last week he left me one that said “Here’s looking at you, kid” because we had watched Casablanca the night before. I finish up my sandwich and find the chart in the atlas that tells you the distance between major cities. The distance between Chicago and Miami is 1,378 miles. I think about how far that is and then about leaving him a note of my own that says “I’m pregnant” and just seeing what happens.
After work, I don’t go to the gym. I go to Planned Parenthood for a real pregnancy test. I have to be sure. The waiting room is small and dark and smells like cat piss. I try breathing through my mouth while I fill out the paperwork, but then it’s like I’m tasting the air. When I’m done filling out the forms, I try to read a magazine, but I can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about my parents. Especially my mother. Whenever anything goes wrong, she lights her San Judas candle and prays three times a day. Now she’ll probably up it to four. For some reason, I also think about Dr. Peña, and what she’s going to say. What if she thinks I’m some loser who got knocked up by her car-racer boyfriend? I picture her explaining my “situation” to her daughters, calling me an unwed mother. At least I’m not like my cousin who’s twentytwo and has a kid with a guy in jail in upstate New York. She goes to visit him every couple months. Sometimes she takes the kid, sometimes she doesn’t.
Twenty minutes later, I’m in an exam room, talking to a doctor with extremely thick eyebrows about the date of my last period. “I’m not sure. Sometime last month,” I tell her. “Or maybe the month before.”
“Okay,” she says, pointing to my lower body. “Let’s figure out what’s going on in there.” She hands me a cup and leads me down the hallway. “Do you know how to catch a clean sample?”
I nod and go into the bathroom.
After I’m done, the doctor sends me back into the exam room. When she comes in, I’m reading a pamphlet about gonorrhea. She looks at the pamphlet. “Would you like to be tested?” I shake my head and put the pamphlet down on the examination table.
“Well,” she says, opening my file and writing something in it, “your pregnancy test was positive.” And even though I already knew it, even though I’m only here for confirmation, it surprises me. Somehow, hearing it from a doctor makes it worse. “Do you have a plan from here forward? Would you like to speak to someone about your options?” She’s using a TV voice now, and her eyebrows look even bushier.
“No. I have a plan,” I say. “I’m keeping it.”
“You are.” It’s more of a statement with a question inside.
“Yeah.” I knew yesterday that I wasn’t having an abortion. Not because I’m against it or anything. I just know I can’t do it. Sitting there on the exam table, though, I realize something else: that there’s this tiny little part of me that feels like maybe this was supposed to happen. Like maybe in some really weird way, it’s the right thing for my life—or could be, eventually.
The doctor tells me to visit my regular gynecologist as soon as I can, and then that’s it, the appointment’s over. “Okay,” she says, smiling and touching my arm as she leads me out the door. “Call us if you need anything else.” Her hand on my arm makes me feel good, safe, but the fact that I even need to feel safe makes me feel scared and alone again, and now I’m having to take really deep but really soft breaths to keep from crying. She walks down the hall to her next patient, and I hurry out through the cat-piss waiting room, open the door, and almost run to my car.
I get in and turn it on, blast the AC—it’s June and nine hundred degrees out—but I don’t leave the parking lot. I just sit there, sweating and crying and feeling like the only person in the world. I want to tell someone, but I feel like I can’t tell anyone until I tell Robert. And I can’t tell Robert. Suddenly I’m having these crazy thoughts, wondering what I’m doing with him, whether I really love him or what. I want to talk to Annie, but she’s down in Colombia with Julio, going to parties and dinners, meeting his abuelita and all his aunts and uncles, becoming part of their family. Meanwhile, I’m up here, my life splitting open like a hem. After a few minutes, I get it together, put the car in drive, and go.
It’s a little after seven when I get to Robert’s house. I let myself in with the key he gave me a few months ago. He left it for me on my windshield with a note that said “Me casa su casa” and later Flaco and I made fun of him for being a gringo and spelling mi wrong. The TV’s on, but no one’s watching it. Through the sliding-glass door, I see Robert and Flaco out in the backyard working on their cars. Flaco’s got an old RX-7 he replaced the engine on, and Robert’s got an Ultima he’s tricked out with fenders and special hubcaps and a muffler that makes the car sound like an airplane.
I put down the groceries I bought and go outside to let them know I’m here. Guns N’ Roses is playing on the boom box that’s sitting on the ground, and they’re both standing over the RX-7, smoking cigarettes and looking in. Flaco’s shining a flashlight down into the engine.
“Move it more to the left,” Robert says. “I can’t see.” He’s wearing a tank top with the Tasmanian Devil on it. He loves the Tasmanian Devil. He even has him tattooed on his chest. When he sees me walk up, he says, “Hey, did you see Josie?”
For a second I’m thrown off, but then I remember that I told him I was going to the gym after work. His step-sister Josie works the desk and got me a reduced-rate membership.
“No,” I say.
“She owes me fifty bucks.”
Flaco says, “Dude, doesn’t she always owe you fifty bucks?”
“Shut up, dude.”
“I brought the rest of dinner,” I say. “Baked potatoes and a salad.”
“Great,” Robert says. He puts out his cigarette on the ground. “The ribs are in the fridge.”
When they got into the whole racing thing, he and Flaco installed a carport in the yard so they could work on the cars in the shade. This is pretty much what they do every night. They come home from work, crack a beer, get high, and go outside to work on their cars.
Robert’s under the RX-7 now, tools and car parts clanking on the cement. “Hand me the ten-millimeter,” he says to Flaco, but Flaco’s bent over the hood pulling on some kind of cable, so I get the little socket out of the kit where they’re all lined up like teeth.
“Thanks, baby,” he says.
“So what are you guys doing?”
“Getting ready to replace this clutch,” Flaco says.
“Did it go bad, or did you just wear it out?”
Robert launches into a long explanation that I only sort of understand, but I nod and say “yeah” a lot. It’s what I used to do when Manny talked about cranes. Once he became a crane operator in the Army, he never shut up about it. When Robert’s done, I tell him I need to go start the potatoes.
“Will you get me another beer?” he asks.
“Yep. Flaco, you need one?”
“Thanks,” Flaco says, draining his beer and handing me the bottle.
I take their empties into the kitchen. There’s a pipe and a bag of dope on the counter next to the fridge, and on top of the fridge is a bunch of protein shake stuff from when Flaco decided he was going to get in shape last year. I turn on the oven and wash the potatoes. I know I should tell him tonight—the sooner the better and all that. But I’m not really sure what I want him to say. I think about all the things you have to do when you have a kid: bathtime, dinnertime, bedtime. There are so many times. And you have to go to their baseball games and their school plays. You have to help them with their homework. You can’t just get high and play with your car all night long. My father was the one who helped me with my homework, especially the math. I always had trouble with word problems—all those trains departing and arriving in different cities. He’d count on his fingers, and I’d tell him you’re not supposed to do that. “Mierda,” he’d say. “If it works, you do it.”
I try to imagine Robert sitting down at the kitchen table, figuring out which train will arrive first. I just can’t see it. All I can see is the X-Men poster in the living room, the PlayStation on the floor, the beer bottles all over the coffee table. I wonder whether dating someone with a Tasmanian Devil tattoo is really a good idea. The crazy thing is, two days ago I was fine. With him, with my life, with everything. I was just going to work and thinking about painting my bathroom orange. Now I’m learning about the lining of my uterus and the impact of lake effect snow.
I go into the living room and sit on the sofa while the oven preheats. Robert used to deliver for a futon store, so everything in here—the sofa, the chairs, everything—is futon furniture. It looks kind of dumb, but the real problem isn’t what it looks like. It’s where it’s located. The sofa is practically on top of the television. They keep it there because their Playstation cords only reach so far. I sit there, three feet from the screen, and watch a fat white guy in a Hawaiian shirt spin the wheel on Wheel of Fortune. He lands on $400 and asks Vanna to reveal all the Ts in the puzzle. She lights up four of them. The audience claps for him, and it occurs to me that the furniture doesn’t have to be set up this way. The sofa can go back against the wall, and the chairs can go near the TV. I get up and start moving stuff around, taking one end of the sofa first, then the other. Once I get it where I want it, I start working on the chairs. Over in the corner is one of those halogen floor lamps that turns on so bright you feel like you’re getting a sunburn. I take it and put it in the kitchen, which could use some more light anyway. When I come back in, a mousy woman in a purple jacket is buying Os.
The living room is starting to look better, except for the X-Men poster, which is sort of ruining the whole look of the place. Robert has a print of the Brooklyn Bridge on the wall above his dresser, so I swap it out with that. While I’m in the bedroom trying to re-hang the X-Men, I remember something I read in the pregnancy book about women who get a sudden urge to clean the whole house or reorganize all the closets. It’s called nesting. The book said it’s not supposed to happen until the ninth month, but I decide that maybe, under special circumstances, it can kick in early. Maybe if your boyfriend’s house looks like a dorm room, it can happen at any time.
I go get the little green lamp off Robert’s nightstand—he never uses it anyway. I’m plugging it in and arranging it on the table next to some coasters that I found in the kitchen when the sliding glass door opens. “Hey, I thought you were coming back out with the beers,” Robert says. Then he comes into the living room. He just stands there, his hands covered in car grease. Finally, he says, “What’s all this Martha Stewart shit?”
“It’s not Martha Stewart. I was just fixing the place up a little. You know, making it more homey.”
“I thought it was homey.”
“The sofa was too close to the TV. That’s really bad for your eyes.” I point to the television, as if he doesn’t know what one is. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt is solving the puzzle. Mr. Potato Head Start. It’s a Before and After.
“But I like the sofa that close. Otherwise the cords don’t reach.”
“Well, you can use the chairs. You can pull the chairs up when you want to play.”
“That’s a pain in the ass.”
“No it isn’t. Those chairs don’t weigh anything. I just did it. You just move them up when you want to play, then move them back when you’re done.”
He looks at the print of the Brooklyn Bridge, now hanging on the wall behind the sofa. “Why is that in here?”
“It seemed better for the living room, you know? The colors go better in here.” I can feel my heart starting to beat faster. I feel like I have to convince him of this. Like he has to grow up a little, right now, tonight, and have a real living room, one where someone could sit on the sofa and watch a television program without having a seizure.
He looks around again at the way I’ve rearranged the picture frames and the magazines on the coffee table, which is now clear of beer bottles and dirty ashtrays. The remote controls are in a ceramic bowl I got out of the kitchen. He shakes his head. “Whatever, man.” He turns around and goes back in the kitchen. I follow him in there.
“We can try it like that if you want,” he says, getting two beers out of the fridge. “But if it’s a pain in the ass, I’m moving it back.” He opens one of the beers and tosses the cap on the counter.
I stand there, nodding, my pulse going fast, my palms sweating a little. “Okay,” I say, and he opens the sliding glass door and walks out. I hear the Wheel of Fortune music playing, taking the show to commercial.
I start taking the quizzes in Where in the World: The Complete Geography Handbook. I didn’t realize when I bought it that there are actual geography bees, like spelling bees, and that it’s a study guide for people who compete in them. Well, kids who compete in them. The front of the book says, “Grades 4 through 8.” I didn’t see that part. I just saw the word “geography” and bought it. But there’s a section called “Bee Prepared,” and in a way it’s a lot like the What to Expect book, with the chapters on getting ready for the competition and what if you lose and birthing choices and what questions to ask your doctor in month five.
I’m getting better at North America and South America, but I’m still pretty much failing Oceania and The World. In the North America section, there were a couple questions on Cuba—one about the mountains that I got wrong because I didn’t even know Cuba had mountains. To me, mountains are only in really white places—places with snow and lots of white people, like Switzerland or Colorado. I got the other one right, though. It was: What is the capital of Holguín province? I knew it was the city of Holguín, because that’s where I was born. I only lived there for four months. It was 1980, and we came over on the boatlift that August. I don’t remember anything, but my mother talks about all the endless lines we had to stand in, at the port in Mariel, and then again in Key West. The worst, she says, was at the Orange Bowl the night my uncle came to get us. All the thousands of people, everybody lost and scared and looking for someone they knew, someone who would take them home. She says when my father saw my uncle, they both started crying, holding each other and swaying and hugging so hard they almost fell down. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.
This is the kind of thing I imagine myself telling that boy with the greenish-gray eyes. This and the fact that when Christopher Columbus landed in Cuba in 1492, he said it was the most beautiful land to ever be seen by human eyes. Which is exactly what my father says whenever he has a couple claritos and starts talking about the old days. He never wanted to come here, but he hated what was happening in Cuba—everybody living in fear, raising their children to distrust everyone. Then when we got here, things still weren’t great: the Americans thought we were criminals, and the Cubans thought we were trash. It was all because Castro had emptied the jails and let all those people come over. Most of them were just political prisoners, but somehow that didn’t matter. We were the Marielitos, and everybody was better than us. Most Cuban people my age were born here, but when I tell someone I was born in Cuba, that I came over on the boatlift, I always see the little flicker of judgment in their eyes. At least I think I do.
The rest of the week goes by, and I don’t tell a soul. I finally get an e-mail from Annie on Thursday: they’re going to Cartagena for the weekend. Julio’s family has a boat and a beach house with servants there. She won’t be able to call me until next week. I write her back, but all I say is, “Have fun. XOXO.” What else am I going to tell her, except that I’m pregnant and might want to break up with Robert. And that Colombia is bordered by both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. What to Expect When You’re Expecting says I’ll probably experience extreme fatigue for the first few weeks of my pregnancy, and I think that’s setting in. No matter how much I sleep, I’m exhausted all the time, and I’m starting to feel pretty nauseous if I don’t eat something every few hours. I’m keeping Saltines at my desk and hoping nobody asks me anything.
On Friday, I leave my desk every couple hours to dry heave in the bathroom. I don’t think Mari notices, though. She’s too busy talking about this program she’s starting next week.
“It’s Summer Program at Princeton,” she says. “It’s a six-week program where you take courses with other high-school students from across the country, and you receive college credit.”
“But you’re going to college in three months,” I say. I looked up some stuff about Iowa, and now I know that it’s the largest producer of hogs, soybeans, and corn in the country. Also, it was actually part of the Louisiana Purchase, even though it’s four states away to the north. I consider trying to work this into conversation with her, but all she wants to talk about is this Summer Program thing.
“Yeah,” she says. “But this is a really elite program, and it’ll give me six college credits. So with my AP credits, plus the summer credits, I’ll basically be a sophomore going in.”
I’m not really sure what to say, so I just do what I do with Robert and repeat stuff she’s already told me, hoping she’ll expand on it. “So it’s at Princeton?”
“Yeah. And you stay in the dorms on the campus and take classes in the morning and afternoon. Then at night you can go to a poetry slam or a personal development workshop.”
“Cool,” I say. I have no idea what a personal development workshop is.
She keeps talking about the program, about how she’s going to be taking a class called Digital Literacies in the Global Landscape. I almost ask her what that is, but then the phone rings and I just decide to let it go.
“Good morning, Dr. Peña’s office. This is Mari. How may I help you?” She sounds forty years old. She puts the call on hold, then turns to me. “It’s for you. It’s Robert.”
I pick up, and he says, “Hey. Flaco just called me. His brother’s coming to town this weekend and he wants to take us all Jet Skiing tomorrow. You up for it?”
I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than go Jet Skiing, but I also can’t think of an excuse fast enough, so I just say, “Yeah. Sure.”
“Cool,” he says. “I’ll pick you up at nine tomorrow.”
When we hang up, I go into the bathroom again. This time it’s not just dry heaving. I’m in there for a good ten minutes, and when I come out, Dr. Peña is standing right there. “Monica,” she says, “are you sick?” She puts her hand on my back for a second, and, just like with the Planned Parenthood doctor, I almost start crying. Part of me wants to tell her everything—that basically I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life. That I’m afraid I’m too stupid to be somebody’s mother.
“I think I ate something bad last night,” I say. “I feel better now.”
“Well, if it gets worse, you should definitely go home. Mari’s here. She can handle things.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding and looking mostly at my shoes.
When I go back to my desk, Mari’s on my computer. She’s making an appointment for a patient who’s standing at the counter.
“Sandra’s computer froze,” she says. “I’ll be done in a minute.”
“No problem,” I say. She could probably do my job and Sandra’s ten times over.
She writes out an appointment card and hands it across the desk. I pick up the phone and pretend to make a call so she won’t try to talk to me again.
The next morning I wait for Robert on the front step because I’m afraid my apartment smells like vomit. I know I’m being paranoid, but I can’t help it. I still can’t have the conversation with him. What if he wants to move in with me? Or what if he offers to kick Flaco out so I can move in with him? What if he wants to get married? All this stuff just keeps running through my head. Plus, last night I looked up ‘jet skiing while you’re pregnant’ on the Internet and got about a thousand hits, all telling me not to do it. Most of what I found was from people named things like smartymom19, who said that if you bounce too hard, water can shoot up into your vagina. I’m not exactly sure why that’s bad, but apparently it is. A lot of the warnings were for women who are way more pregnant than I am, though, so I’ve convinced myself it’ll be okay. I know how much Robert wants to go, and I feel bad that I’ve been avoiding him all week.
He pulls into the driveway and smiles at me through the windshield. I smile back and walk to his car like everything’s fine. He’s smoking, so I have to roll down the window.
“Hey, the AC’s on,” he says.
“I know. I just want a little fresh air.”
“Are you crazy? It’s ninety-five degrees out.”
“No, I’m not crazy.” I sigh loudly and roll the window up halfway.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing. I’m good. Where’s Flaco?”
Robert says he got called into work, that the guy who normally works Saturdays is sick. So it’s just going to be us and Flaco’s brother Gabriel and Gabriel’s wife, Lindy. Which I’m thinking might be a little weird. Robert’s known Gabriel for years, but they never hang out without Flaco. Gabriel and Lindy live in a big house on the water up in Jacksonville. He owns a bunch of laundromats, and whenever he comes down, he treats Flaco and Robert to things like jet skiing and fishing trips. He likes to throw his money around so everybody knows how rich he is. Robert thinks he’s cool, says I just have to get to know him better. I think he’s a prick with a beer gut and a receding hairline. We get out onto 874 and Robert tells me they’re staying on Key Biscayne, that we’re picking them up at the hotel and then driving to some place down by the Rickenbacker Causeway to rent the jet skis.
We meet them in the lobby next to a fountain made of bronze or some kind of orange metal. Gabriel’s wearing blue swim trunks with sharks on them and a white polo with the collar turned up. He’s got sunglasses on even though we’re inside. Lindy’s wearing nothing but a black string bikini and a white mesh cover-up that doesn’t really cover up anything. The breast implants Gabriel gave her for Christmas last year are on serious display. She’s tiny—a size two at most—and next to her, I feel like the Michelin Man. I’ve always been okay with my body, but What to Expect says that when you’re pregnant, your hip bones actually move, and that some women’s never move back. Thinking about this freaks me out, and I have to force myself to think about something else. I count the cracks in the floor tiles and try to remember the capital of Hungary.
Gabriel insists we take their rental car, and on the way, Lindy tells us about the gourmet Cuban restaurant they went to last night.
“I had a plantain dish with goat cheese and lemongrass in it,” she says. “It was amazing.”
“That sounds awesome,” Robert says. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know what goat cheese is. Or lemongrass.
Gabriel says, “Bro, you gotta go there.”
“Definitely. What’s it called again?”
“Cocina. It’s on Lincoln and thirteenth.”
“Baby, let’s go next weekend, okay?” Robert says to me.
I just look at him. “Definitely,” I say, and then turn to look out my window for the rest of the ride.
The Jet Ski place is a big tiki hut on the sand next to a dock. Lindy and I wait outside while the guys go in to rent the skis. I’ve only hung out with her twice before and both times we were pretty drunk. Totally sober, it’s obvious we don’t know what to say to each other. We talk about the hotel and how nice it is and how usually they stay on South Beach at the Delano, but Gabriel wanted to change it up this time.
Finally, the guys come back out, along with a kid in a T-shirt that says Tony’s Jet Skis. Since he’s about fifteen years old, I assume he’s not Tony. We walk down to the dock and stand there while the kid explains the rules—how long we have the skis and how far we’re allowed to take them. “You can’t go past those buoys,” he says, pointing to a string of orange dots out in the bay. The skis bob on the water next to us, and I get hit with a wave of nausea so bad my mouth fills up with spit. I swallow a couple times and, miraculously, it passes. Within five minutes, we’re in life jackets and out on the water.
We ride out, over toward downtown. Robert’s following Gabriel, and, of course, they’re headed right for the buoys. The water’s smooth, thank God. The sky is something out of a movie—blue with thin, wispy, white clouds. Out past the buoys, a flock of pelicans is fishing. They’re big and brown and they skim the surface looking for fish. When they find some, they fly up into the air and then dive down into the water—nose first, wings tucked, hitting with a splash. They hit so hard I’m almost surprised they ever come back up. When they do, they float around for a few minutes, getting ready for the next dive. I watch them and try not to think about anything, to just relax and look at the blue sky and feel the wind on my face.
Once we get close to the buoys, Gabriel signals to Robert, and they both slow down and float around for a few minutes while they talk about where they want to go next. A school of little gray fish dart around in the water. For some reason, this reminds me of when I was in fifth grade and our class took a field trip to Crandon Park, where we walked around in tide pools and learned about marine life from a woman who was missing part of a finger. I liked science when I was in elementary school. Maybe the kid with the greenish-gray eyes will like science, too. Maybe I should go back to the bookstore for a book on fish or coral reefs. Maybe pelicans. I could learn about birds of the sea.
Now that we’re stopped, I try to adjust my life jacket. It’s squeezing my boobs, which are starting to get really sore these days. I’ve got two of the straps unbuckled, and I’m working on the third, and I’m wishing I’d brought a baseball cap because the sun is so hot on my face that it’s giving me a headache, and then, suddenly, Robert takes off, fast. My neck whips back and I try to grab onto him, but I miss. I go flying off and into the water. I sink for a few seconds—not far, but enough to come up choking, water in my nose, my head burning with that awful feeling that makes you feel scared and like an idiot at the same time. I squeeze my nose, trying to get it to stop. Robert’s twenty feet away, but turning around and coming back now, it looks like. Lindy and Gabriel are still right there on their ski.
“Are you okay?” Gabriel says, turning off his engine.
“Fuck,” I say. All I can think about is those stupid chat rooms and smartymom19.
“Monica, are you alright?” Lindy asks, because I’m still coughing and spitting.
I nod, dog-paddling to keep myself up. The life jacket is half hanging off of me. “Yeah,” I tell her. “I’m okay.”
Robert pulls up and cuts his engine. “Baby, I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought you were ready.”
“I wasn’t,” I say. “Obviously.”
He’s acting concerned and apologetic, but I can tell he’s actually trying not to laugh. “Oh shit, baby. I’m sorry,” he says again. Then I see him make a face at Gabriel, and I realize they’re both trying not to laugh. Lindy’s just looking at them, clueless.
“This isn’t funny, Robert. I could have gotten hurt.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Come on.” He reaches his hand down to help me back onto the ski. “Let’s start over.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. I’m furious now. At him, of course, but also at myself for even coming today. I can’t believe I did this just to please him. I should be home, on my couch, by myself.
“Let’s just keep going,” he says. “I’m sorry. It was an accident. I was just fucking around. I was trying to race Gabriel.” He looks at Gabriel then. “Dude, didn’t you get my signal?”
“What signal?” Gabriel says.
I shake my head. “I don’t care. I just want to go back.” I climb back onto the ski.
Robert says, “Baby, come on. I promise I won’t do it again.”
“Please,” I say. “Just take me back to the dock.”
“For real?” His voice is harder now, less jokey, less apologetic.
I don’t care. I’m freaking out, worried about a miscarriage, worried about everything. “I’ll just wait for you guys on the shore.”
Robert sighs and then turns to Gabriel. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Okay,” Gabriel says, and Lindy gives me a sort of pitying look that I try to decide is just her being nice.
Robert starts the Jet Ski and we take off, heading back toward land. I want to throw up again, but the wind in my face is cool and a little wet and that actually helps—I feel like I might at least be able to make it to the tiki hut. I wonder if there’s any chance they have a real bathroom there. I’m probably going to have to puke in the sand right in front of everyone. At this point, I don’t think I care. I just want to get back, and sit down somewhere, and not have to talk to Robert, or watch him act like a fool trying to impress Gabriel. Then, as soon as I can get home, I’m going back to the store for another pregnancy test. Maybe I’ll buy twenty and take one every hour, on the hour, until I know I’m in the clear.
We ride past a speedboat named She Bop and a couple of other people on skis like ours, people who have rented from Tony’s. I think about what Annie might be doing right now, whether she and Julio are out on his boat, whether he’s acting like some ridiculous fourteen-year-old kid. I doubt it. They’re probably having a great time, swimming and snorkeling in water so blue it looks fake, and then later they’ll go to a party at his parents’ house, where waiters in crisp white shirts will pass around appetizers that look like exotic flowers. I can see all of it—the food, the sunset, the guests in beautiful clothes. And then somewhere in between the sound of the ice in the glasses and the voices of the people and the music playing in the background, it turns into a cocktail party at Dr. Peña’s house with me in a black dress and black heels, not fat or pregnant. I’ve already had the baby, and he’s spending the night with my parents, who think he’s adorable and charming and worthy of their love. I’ve lost all the baby weight and my hair looks great. I talk to Dr. Peña’s friends about politics and history and maybe science. And I’m sipping a glass of wine, even though in real life I hate wine. At my throat is a necklace like the one Dr. Peña’s daughter had on that day. Not exactly the same—the stone in mine is blue, not yellow, but I can see everyone admiring it, asking me where I got it, telling me how pretty it is. Just as I reach for one of those exotic flowers, Robert reaches back and pats my leg. “You okay now?” he says, over the roar of the engine.
“Yeah,” I say. “Fine.”
“Good,” he says. He speeds up a little so that it feels like we’re flying across the water toward the shore. Behind us, I know the pelicans are gliding above the surface of the water, looking for food, then shooting up in the air and dropping back down at just the right moment, their bodies and brains trained to do it perfectly every time. And then I see the boy again, his green-gray eyes looking at me with all those questions, wanting to know how, what, why the world is the way it is. “It just is,” I hear a voice say, and I know that it’s mine.”
Tita Ramirez lives in North Carolina and teaches writing at Elon University. Her debut novel, Tell It To Me Singing, which is based on this story, will be published by Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in 2024.
Photo by Arturo Añez