Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (20 page)

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their tortoise-shell glasses. These women have prophesied the baby's sex and provided their choices for names. Jacob for a boy; Rachel for a girl. They are impressed and slightly skeptical that in her ninth month she still swims.

They started talking to her when she began to show in the fifth, gathering around her, one by one. One woman told her, "I drank straight through each time and every son: over six feet."

Another said, "The first time, now that was special. Harry treated me like some kind of glass ball." She pulled off her bathing cap with a snap of rubber against skin. "But by the third, it was 'Ruth, this had better be the boy.' "

Someone else had a daughter born under a register at Filene's during Christmas shopping. They've all talked about the perfection of the hands and feet. Anna imagines her baby's fingers, plump and tiny stars. No one lets on about children lost, unfinished, insufficient.

They are more than kind, these women. They have also all noticed, glancing at her hands and smiling, that there's no ring. No one's said a word.

In the slow lane, Anna watches the webby reflections of the water dance on the vaulted ceiling. The water, warm today, is its usual unnatural blue, and laps softly against the white sides of the pool. Anna backstrokes to and fro inside the echoing rectangle. She shares the lane with a calm and dreamy woman in a red, draped suit. Everything fades in the warm safeness. Anna is stretched just far enough. Her belly's buoyant. It breaks the surface. She can barely feel it. Anna's nearly asleep when the baby breaks the peace, swims off in another direction.

The motion picks up deep in the library's stacks, where the pages of the British ladies' journals let up their musty smell. Anna's working on ten of the documents, written by colonial wives in India at the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the books are still bound in tattered leather tooled in gold, and Anna's

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careful not to let her wet hair dot their fragile pages. For several years, she's been trying to extract her dissertation from these stories, stories about women who ran Sunday schools in jungles, nursed wan phalanxes of soldiers, taught Indians just enough English to obey orders and recite the Lord's Prayer.

When people ask Anna what she's writing on, she's got a tag for it, compact as a vitamin: "domestic imperialism," she says and raises an eyebrow, hoping she looks as if that explained everything. But that doesn't come near to describing how it feels to be pulled into an exotic sea of tales that is actually real, a world academia magically makes respectable enough to write about. Even when the weather's gray, Anna blinks when she comes out of the library. It takes her a moment to realize that the trees are oaks, not palms, that the Square is not Calcutta but an American snarl of traffic to her left.

There's another reason she avoids talking about her work. Even after almost two years of writing, she's had trouble finding a thesis to capture these people. Women who could cross the Ganges at full flood, raise five children, revile their servants, condescend to rajahsAnna can't find one statement to contain them. After she published an article on the women's response to cholera, her adviser, Anju Srinivasan, said, "Lovely tidbits, Anna, but what's the bloody thing about?" Anju wears a tilak, a sari, and has the chicest, shortest hair of anyone Anna knows. Despite the hair, she is known as Indira on the Charles.

Anna remembers sitting in Anju's study a few weeks ago, waiting for approval on the latest chapter. The sun struck Anju's desktop, littered with framed photos of her neatly bearded husband and their three children. They all had peaceful smiles. The pictures were taken during summer, against dense green. Anna envisioned them seated around a table, passing samosas from a silver platter, complaining about the raita. She was imagining her own child, bald and willful, throwing spoons across the kitchen as the computer hummed, when Anju let out a little sigh.

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"Well," she said, looking at Anna over half-moon glasses, "Give it one more go before you have to spend all your time bashing around with an infant." Anju paused. ''You've become quite the center of attention in the department. They're all intrigued." Anna thought about the professors with their mops of silver hair, whispering, for once, about a student instead of tenure-committee gossip or
Dix-Huit Brumaire
. Anju swept a finger of dust from one of the photographs and said, "Go on now, burrow in."

So Anna is here, trying to get something done that won't make Anju scream, "Throw it in the recycling bin!" The late afternoon sun floods the corridors like steeped tea. One of her ladies hates the heat, writes, "The weather here is so intense that even spelling
HOT
in capital italics cannot convey the discomfort of life on the Deccan Plain before monsoon." It really must have been awful. They rarely complained.

These women could watch mutely as the faces of their five-year-olds faded while the boats taking them to proper English schools moved toward the horizon. One woman wrote, "It is a joy to know that Reginald will flourish in England's healthier climate," with this entry dated a few months later: "Sister wrote to say that Reggie died of pneumonia in March." And that was all. At first Anna wondered how they survived the thought of their children dying, how they or anyone survived that at all. But then her older brother Pea had died, in a ball of metal and fire in the thin atmosphere over Alaska, and she'd begun to understand how these British strangers might have managed. Anna's mother, Lowell, still called Babe at fifty-five, never flinched: the only sign of pressure after Pea's death was a tightness in her jaw that sometimes wavered with a crazy pulse.

Sometimes Anna thinks Babe would have been at home with the stiff-upper-lipness of the Raj, though she would have laughed at the woman who had cobras lured from the grass to be pickled in vats of brine. Anna shuts the journal and opens up a thick-spined atlas. She stares at the triangle of India, divvied into

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patches of tropical orange and green under which nine hundred million people live. What does she really know about this place, its people? She's spent years mulling, sometimes napping, over Macauley; handling the flaking pages of the journals; taking notes on films narrated by disembodied British voices. But nothing makes sense of the conquerors' shrill and driven attempts to justify their presence on the plains and in the jungles, their impossibly rigid efforts to stay English in the face of the alien.

Anna shifts in her seat. Not ever having ever been to India always makes her uneasy, especially now. After the baby's born, she'll be stateside, as Anju says, a thought that both reassures and distresses her. But why should she go? Their India was different, she couldn't find it if she went. Their houses aren't standing; there are no documents she needs. These long-dead ladies, these imperial ghosts, have put her off with their terse stories of malaria, snakes, fakirs on beds of nails.

"Anna, first of all there's
quinine
," said Monroe, her best friend and a fellow graduate student in history. "Second, the only place you're going to see a cobra is in some bazaar for tourists. And I think seeing someone on a bed of nails would be pretty interesting. I mean, don't you want to know how someone gets impervious to pain?" But she and Monroe both know she puts off going because being in the present makes Anna more than a little nervous. India's too big, too real; it would swamp the territory she's mapped out for herself and sweep it out to sea.

The tea-brown light fades, goes black. The leaded panes of the windows rattle in a sudden kicking wind. Rain pours down in heavy cords. An image surges in her brain: in rhododendrons tall as trees, monkeys with black faces and white tails chatter in the branches, nibble on ripe buds, and launch stones at each other. She sees a mass of clouds that moves above them through air as dry and hot as brown paper ready to burst into fire. There's a cluster of huts at a distance from the trees. Anna's aware, looking at the deep cracks in the earth, that she's on the edge of the Deccan Plain

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and the monsoon is about to hit. The temperature jags downward, and as it falls, a huge wind rises. A drop of rain spits to the ground. Then the rain falls faster, thicker, pummels the earth, churns it to mud. In the racing wind, the cloud lets out sheet after sheet of rain. Suddenly she sees women, Indian women, who pour from the huts, their saris, magenta and green threaded with gold, streaming behind. The rain spatters the loose clothes like spots of black dye, then turns them dark and clinging. Anna hears the clink of their gold bangles as they run, the crackle of their voices. Pale brown mud spatters their hems and cocoa-colored ankles. This is what she sees when she imagines monsoon: ecstatic Indian women, whirling in drenched saris, arms alive with bracelets raised to a black sky.

Anna is too embarrassed at dinner to tell Monroe about this fantasy as they sit at her round table under the green-shaded light. It is so wrong to have this romantic vision of a country that's suffered from exploding chemical plants and assassinated leaders. Like the pictures of the baby's hands, however, it won't leave her.

She's glad Monroe is there to help the picture recede by insisting on the day's details. He's telling her about a fresh slight from his adviser, a frequent topic, comfortable as reruns. They are eating a dinner he has made. Since Anna barred him from stenciling another elephant on the nursery's yellow walls, he compensates with armfuls of groceries, slabs of swordfish or pale filets of sole. When he catches Anna slipping money for the food into his backpackhe spends a lot of his stipend on season tickets for the Celticshe takes it out and says, "Put it in the fund for the future astronaut."

Although he turned white when the serene and vacant teacher at the Lamaze class asked if he were Anna's birthing partner, he takes his role seriously. He sees part of his responsibility as preparing the baby for life as a Celtic fan and sometimes recites stats at Anna's stomach while she reads about weaning. He's writing his

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dissertation on the development of organized sports in the nineteenth century and knows a lot of trivia about American culture, including phrenology. Last month, he tried to read Anna's stomach to find out if the child would have the temperament for basketball. But Anna stopped him, pushed his hands away a little more abruptly than she meant to. "You're traveling, Coach," she snapped, startled to find herself so upset.

"Excuse me, Empress," said Monroe. That night, around two, he called and said, "You know, Anna, I don't care that even though I helped find you a rent-control apartment in the center of
Cambridge
, I really don't mind you won't tell me who the father is." There was a pause. "I really don't."

Anna imagined him in his kitchen, dirty white where hers was yellow and green, shirt rumpled, brown hair spiking out above his left eyebrow. It is hard on him when couples in Lamaze class ask if this is their first. "I'm sorry Larry's hurt, Monroe." Bird was on the disabled list again.

"He'll make it back, Anna. I just thought I'd let you know. About that other stuff."

Looking at him mash the peas and brown rice together on his plate, Anna tries not to worry about other stuff, though it's close to impossible not to. She can lose nights imagining the baby won't be whole, that some recessive gene will scramble its skeleton. She sees herself drawn and faded, smelling vaguely of sour milk, jouncing the baby's tender body as she negotiates city curbs with a stroller. She catches herself praying her thanks to the grandfather, with the profile that deserved a coin, for the money that will barely make it possible to keep the baby.

Monroe stops talking and looks at her. "I've crossed the indulgence threshold, right? Thesis trauma can only be rehashed twelve times in one evening?"

"No, look, I'm sorry, it's not that," Anna says, cutting a square out of the fish that she proceeds to halve into triangles.

"Is it the fish? The guy said Julia Child bought three pounds

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this afternoon,'' he says, bending down to give the filet a critical look. Its edges have curled with the sweet butter of the sauté. "Oh, I get it. The tawdry realm of single motherhood."

"Disposable or cotton?" Anna cries. Several peas go bouncing off her plate, roll under the stove.

"Can I remind you what happened when you told me you were going to have the baby?" Monroe pours himself some water and says, "You said, 'Monroe, I'm going to have a baby and nobody had better talk me out of it.' Then you burst into tears and said your life was over. I made you couscous and bought a quart of milk. Which you drank."

Anna pokes him in the arm and says, "It's time for the game." As they arrange themselves on the sofa, she remembers why she went out with him for that brief time the first year of graduate school. They had decided quite quickly that people who felt as comfortable as they did wouldn't have much luck as lovers. Otherwise, she would never have had the quiet pleasure of listening to the hectic, clownish voices of the broadcasters and keeping an eye on Monroe. She watches, as the Celtics lose to the Knicks, how the
TV
throws shadows of the dancing players off his glasses, and how he likes to hold a pillow to his stomach when he watches a game.

All night, the baby performs tiny gymnastics, as if it knows its agility is going to be tested the next day. On the way to the obstetrician, Anna tells her stomach, "Cut that out. That's my bladder you're stepping on." The baby just keeps tap dancing in delicate, insistent steps as Anna hauls herself onto the T. The baby has a will of its own and it's not even born. Anna's both proud and a little uneasy. At least Dr. Howland is satisfied.

Anna's doctor is a woman in her forties who raises champion Irish setters. Sometimes Anna feels she'd better give birth to a blue-ribbon baby or Dr. Howland will be mad. Now, two weeks before she is due, Dr. Howland tells her, "You've gained just the right amount; blood pressure good." Anna is bloomingly healthy.

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