Not Perfect(71)

Inside, Fern was watching television. When Tabitha got closer she could see she was watching The Walking Dead, and her first instinct was to yell at her. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be watching that! But then she felt so utterly sorry for her that she just sat down next to her and didn’t mention the content of the show. She knew Fern had watched all the DVDs they had over and over again, she probably held off on this one for as long as she could. It was a gift Tabitha had bought for Stuart last year. She thought at the time it might be something they could watch together, something that had absolutely nothing to do with their lives, something that might make their own lives seem not so bad. They never watched it. Tabitha could see the clear plastic on the coffee table that Fern had peeled off of the DVD.

“Hey, Fernie Bernie,” she said soothingly. “Aunt Rachel is here. She brought dinner.”

Fern nodded, her eyes on the screen. A man with a beard was hacking away at a zombie.

“Here, turn that off for now, come eat.”

Fern didn’t respond. Tabitha sat back to get a better look at her. Her bad leg was stretched out, completely stiff, and her other leg was tucked under her. She looked thin, and there were purplish circles under her eyes. Tabitha was doing a terrible, terrible job of taking care of her.

“Come on, Fern,” she coaxed. “Come into the kitchen. You must be starving.”

“When this is over.”

“How much longer?” Tabitha asked, hoping this was one of the less violent episodes, if there was such a thing.

Fern sighed and pushed a button on the remote to pause it.

“Eleven minutes,” Fern said.

“Okay, fine, but come in when it’s over,” Tabitha said. “Don’t start another one.”

Again, Fern didn’t respond. Tabitha got up and walked back into the kitchen. Rachel had pulled the containers out of the shopping bag and placed them on the granite island. Tabitha was wrong, it wasn’t chicken Marsala. It was meatballs and lasagna and some kind of parmesan: chicken or veal or eggplant. It all looked so good. Now she could imagine eating this, chewing, swallowing.

There was literally one light bulb illuminating the big, grand kitchen. Tabitha knew Rachel would normally say something about this, but she didn’t now. She pretended to not notice, or that it was normal, something. Tabitha took a seat on one of the stools and let Rachel do all the work, set the table, hunt for napkins that weren’t there. Again, she didn’t ask.

“Okay, so please tell me what’s going on with you,” Tabitha said, leaning her chin into her left hand. “I’m so sorry I stole the thunder.”

“Yeah, well you did that,” she said, but nicely. Thank goodness for Rachel. “Okay so here’s the thing. And my thing is not as important as your thing, I think, even though an hour ago it seemed very important; it seemed like the most important thing in the world. I can see now, my thing is something that doesn’t exist yet, while your thing exists and needs help.”

“Wait, I didn’t mean we had to be in competition, whose thing is more important,” Tabitha said. “I didn’t mean that at all. I don’t even know what your thing is.”

“No, I know that,” Rachel said, spooning a little of everything onto Tabitha’s plate. “Is Fern coming?”

“In a minute,” Tabitha said. “She’s finishing a show.”

“Okay, well, what I meant was that it sort of helped put my thing in perspective. I am all cleared and ready to be inseminated. I can go into the doctor’s office on Monday, and they can shoot the sperm toward an egg, and then I would wait, and it could go one way or another, I don’t know which.”

“That’s so great,” Tabitha said, moving off the stool and going to hug Rachel. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“Wait, I’m not done,” Rachel said, stopping Tabitha mid-hug. “So, when I think about waiting, and finding out which way it might go—am I pregnant? Am I not pregnant?—I honestly don’t know which I would hope for. That’s crazy, right? I should know. I should be hoping to achieve pregnancy. That’s the goal here.”

“Sure,” Tabitha said. “That’s the goal.”

“I don’t think I want that,” Rachel said slowly. “I don’t want to be home alone with a newborn baby. It seemed like such a good idea two months ago. A way to not be alone, a way to have a baby without needing to find the right person to share it with, a way to make my eventual old age seem not so bleak, but now I realize, it might not be for me. If I could jump ahead and have a ten-year-old maybe, or even a seven-year-old, that sounds okay. Busy, but okay. But how does anyone recover from newborn hell all alone? Doesn’t that ruin a person? Wouldn’t I be doing everything in my power to make myself unattractive to a potential partner? ‘Oh hey, sorry I left the spit up out of the picture on the dating site, but you better get used to it,’ or, ‘You don’t mind waiting while I nurse the baby, do you? It will only take a few hours because the baby is having trouble latching, and after that we can go on our first date.’ I can see it might be right for someone, but I don’t think it’s right for me. The thing is, now I’ve started this process. I picked the donor: we have the sperm, and I have imagined this possible being, so now it feels like I’m saying good-bye to something.”