Fishbowl: A Novel Read online

  And then I’m gone.

  Like I was never even here in the first place.

  Garth draws a deep breath to steady his heart and gives the package a squeeze, pinching it between the crook of his arm and his torso. It gives a reassuring crackle in return. He takes it in both hands and gives it another squeeze. The softness compresses to a point, and then he can feel something solid and hard in the middle. He repeats the motion and decides he has to run up the remaining flights. He needs to move through this horrible space as quickly as he can. He needs to get to his apartment and recapture the full excitement he had felt before the stairwell sucked it out of him.

  He runs.

  A city full of people and a world full of billions, and this is who I am. How could there be only one me?

  Who could I be if I weren’t me? Garth wonders as he hoofs up the stairs. Who in these walls, who in the city but myself? Nobody knows this Garth, so what is to say the story would be any different for another Garth?

  That little kid who ran by me a few seconds ago? That little kid is just starting out and getting to know the world. I could be just starting out again, learning of all the wonders and monotony and thrills and fears.

  That young woman that Danny and I saw walking past at the construction site, that woman goes into the drugstore and buys … what? Buys chocolates and fashion magazines and whatever else a woman buys in a drugstore? If I were her, I would know how it feels to be stared at, to overhear snippets of Danny talking, knowing he’s talking about me.

  Is that any less a lonely place to be than having eyes pass you by entirely? Still nobody really knows you, not like you know yourself.

  Garth pants and puffs. Within a few flights, his sprint up the stairs slows to a forced lumbering. The back of his shirt, even in the short exertion of three floors, is damp with sweat. He wheezes to bring enough air in. He’s fat. He snorts derisively at himself, at his big body moving up the stairs, slowing with each step, running out of energy already.

  I couldn’t be anyone else, he thinks. I can’t even imagine them, and I can barely be myself.

  By the eleventh floor he has slowed to a plodding pace, one step at a time. When he reaches a landing between flights, he stops again to catch his breath. He pulls the package from under his arm and holds it in one hand. The black plastic bag has slid halfway off, exposing folded brown paper secured with a piece of clear tape at the join. The sweat from his armpit has soaked the paper a deep shade of chocolate in an elongate, uneven smear. He hopes none of his after-work, underarm smells have seeped through. He runs a flat hand over one side, smoothing out the wrinkles in the paper.

  Garth smiles and starts moving again, ignoring his thrumming heart and strained breath. He carries onward, upward, past the sign that reads “Floor 12.” By the sixteenth floor, he needs a rest again. A cramp has formed, stabbing him in the side with each breath he takes. He’s too big and inert by nature to carry on like this without a break. He rests against the wall and leans forward to put his hands on his knees.

  For a moment, he thinks about what would happen if his heart stopped right then. What would they make of him and the package? What would they make of his overexertion, his excitement so obvious it would transcend his death? He decides it wouldn’t matter because he’d be dead and has never been egomaniacal enough to think that his meager legacy matters for anything or to anyone.

  Garth huffs a deep breath and then continues, onward and upward.

  15

  In Which Petunia Delilah Learns That Birthing Can Become Complicated and That Her Housekeeping Skills Could Use Honing

  A film of perspiration slicks Petunia Delilah’s forehead. Her body is stressed, involuntarily working on something, momentarily separated from her consciousness as it goes about its task.

  Surely, Danny will call back quickly. She glances at her watch. He should be done with work by now, but maybe they had to finish something up. Maybe he just didn’t hear the call over the noise of the construction site. It can be so loud she often hears them from the balcony. He’ll notice the missed call, check his message, and come sprinting back to help her. She pictures him running up Roxy and dialing her number. His hard hat falls to the sidewalk behind him with a clatter, but he doesn’t stop to get it. He’s telling her he’s a block away, he’s in the lobby, he’s in the elevator, he’s at the apartment door.

  “Baby,” he would say, “this is the happiest day of my life and it’s all because of you. I love you so much.”

  She dials the cell phone again, mashing the numbers that will connect her to her midwife, Kimmy, who lives with her partner a few blocks away, just off Roxy. Kimmy will help. Everything will be fine when Kimmy shows up. The baby will come, and Danny will run in to find her lying on the bed with his new child nestled against her bosom and her, finally, eating a fucking ice cream sandwich.

  The phone rings five times. Just when she thinks it’s going to go to voice mail, a tentative “Hello?” comes from the other end.

  It’s not Kimmy. Shit, Petunia Delilah thinks, what was her partner’s name? Meg or Mel or something like that.

  “Get Kimmy,” Petunia Delilah grunts. “Tell her it’s Pet, and she has to come help me, the baby’s coming right now.”

  There are three dull beeps.

  Petunia Delilah pulls the phone from her ear and glares at it. The screen is blank. She pokes a button and is rewarded with the image of an empty battery. She had neglected to charge it for days.

  How much of that phone call got through? she wonders as she fumbles around the nightstand, frantic hands focused on finding her phone charger and cursing herself for letting the battery run down. Kimmy’s probably trying to call her back right now. She lets out a blast of air from her nose, a snuffle of frustration at her oversight.

  Surely, Kimmy will head over as soon as she gets the message. Even if she can’t call back, Meg/Mel will tell her it sounded desperate. Kimmy’ll grab her satchel and load it into the basket on the front of her bike. She’ll pedal over the few blocks to the Seville, chain up her bike, and, with the focus of a trained professional midwife, dash through the foyer, rocket up the elevator, and burst through her apartment door, yelling, “Be calm. I’m here. Everything will be all right.”

  Petunia Delilah pauses, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath as the next contraction seizes her body. Breathe through it, she tells herself in the dark behind her eyelids. Just like Kimmy taught you. There’s a honk from outside, so she focuses on that. Distracting her mind from the mounting wave of pain of her body clenching. As it intensifies, she wonders if a home birth was a wise choice. Any kind of painkillers would be welcome right now, and the contractions have just started. Slowly the pain crests and passes. She opens her eyes again.

  That wasn’t so bad, she thinks. Now … where’s the charger? Petunia Delilah glances at Danny’s nightstand on the other side of the bed. It is not there. She riffles the sheets. The old science fiction book she was reading minutes earlier falls to the floor, and the bookmark she had loosely inserted slides from the pages.

  “No,” Petunia Delilah moans, looking at the bookmark and feeling like crying. She stands, staring, the bedsheets crumpled in one fist. She can’t remember what page she was on.

  “No,” she says again, louder this time, and feebly slams her sheets onto the bed, which, being sheets, return an unsatisfying slamming noise. She can’t even remember what was going on in the story, and she was just reading it.

  The next contraction causes Petunia Delilah to drop the cell phone, which she was clutching in the death grip of her left hand. It causes her to double over and then fall to her knees, an automatic response of a body in pain desperate to find a position to alleviate it. Petunia Delilah finds that position on all fours, kneeling beside the bed, beside her dropped cell phone and the book. It’s an animal posture, an indecent one, she thinks, but a somewhat relieving one.

  Look at all the dust, Petunia Delilah thinks as, from this vantage, she can see un
der the bed. Weeks of debris have built up under there. There’s a candy bar wrapper, a paper clip, an unopened condom, and tens of other bits silhouetted by the light coming from the other side of the bed. Since before her diagnosis of hyper-what’s-it and her prescribed bed rest, she has not cleaned under there, and Danny sure as hell never has. An unopened condom? How long has it been since this place was cleaned? Since before the stick turned blue, at least. Come to think of it, Danny never helps with the cleaning, the bastard.

  Petunia Delilah clenches her teeth as the pain mounts again, and she thinks, All that will change. He’s not going to get away with it anymore. She pounds the floor twice with the heel of her hand. Her pain peaks, and she lets out an exasperated squeal and a sharp exhale. He’s going to do his fair share from now on.

  She opens her eyes, and there it is, under the bed, the phone charger.

  Petunia Delilah grabs it and the phone and props herself into a kneeling position before using the bed as support in her struggle back to her feet. She stands for a moment, sadly contemplating the novel again before waddling down the hall toward the kitchen. It’s the only place with a plug that she can reach without having to bend over. Maybe she’ll help herself to a fucking ice cream sandwich while she waits for it to charge enough to use it. It couldn’t do any harm now. The baby’s coming anyway.

  In the first few steps, however, she knows something is going horribly wrong. Never having gone through childbirth before, Petunia Delilah doesn’t know how she knows, but she feels something inside her is amiss. While there are waves of contractions passing over her body, they’re pretty close together already. They’re also unsatisfyingly irregular and weak compared with what she has been told to expect.

  Surely, she thinks, there should be some pressure from her nethers. So far, all the action is bodily, and there’s not much sensation coming from down there.

  As she passes the bathroom, she leans on the doorframe and flips the light switch. The lights flicker on and then blink out. She stands in the dark for a second before they come on again. In the mirror, her nightie drapes wet across her splayed knees. She’s drenched in sweat, and she notices a shadow of stubble under her arm, her armpit exposed by how she leans on the doorframe. She wishes she had shaved that. She wishes she wasn’t looking such a fright—surely the midwife will judge her unkempt and unhygienic. Then she thinks, It’s Kimmy. Surely she’s got hairy pits and a scruffy cootch.

  Petunia Delilah feels so unattractive, though she recognizes this as a random, unfounded thought. She knows she’s having a baby and nobody cares about armpit stubble, or dust under the bed for that matter, but she’s felt so unattractive for so long it would be nice to just feel pretty again. She longs for a minute of attention to be on her, not just her womb. She wants to be seen as a woman again, not just some incubator with legs.

  The next contraction is upon her. She leans forward, both arms stiff and grasping the edge of the sink. She lets the phone and charger slide into the basin with a clatter, scared she will crush them if she keeps them in her hand. The battery pops out of the back of the phone and rattles around against the porcelain. In the mirror, through the part in her hair, her scalp is bright red with the exertion. Her arms are knotted, tense cords of muscle. A string of spittle hangs from her mouth. A purple-green vein juts out of her neck, and another tracks a jagged ridge across her forehead.

  As the contraction peaks, Petunia Delilah gives the sink a shake, rattling it against the wall. When the pain wanes, she reaches down to her thigh and walks her fingers against her skin, bunching up her nightie, inching it up with each finger stroke, until she holds the fabric gathered up in a hand. She draws the fabric above her belly and looks in the mirror, like she has many times in the past few weeks. Unlike those times though, she’s not fascinated by what she sees, she is not intrigued by the shape of her belly or its contents, nor is she filled with a warm anticipation for the baby’s arrival.

  With the glance in the mirror, she knows the cell phone and the charger won’t bring help to her in time. It will take minutes to get a minimal charge on the phone before she can even use it. Then, who knows how long it will be until help comes.

  In the mirror, Petunia Delilah is pale and glossy, and she looks terrified. Her eyes are wide and puffy; her mouth is pinched and drawn, leaning with one arm against the sink and the other holding her bunched-up nightie above her waist.

  In the mirror, at the hinge where Petunia Delilah’s bowed legs meet, below her distended belly button, and protruding from the base of the dark tangle of her pubic hair is a single, waxy blue, tiny little foot with five perfect little toes.

  16

  In Which Claire the Shut-In Immerses Herself in an Edible History

  Ice-cold mineral water. So cold it needs to have little crystal shards floating at the surface. That’s the trick Claire’s mother passed on to her for the most exquisite quiche crust ever. There is none better. The recipe has been handed through generations of Claire’s relatives, one to the next, lifetimes of experimentation and tweaking the mixture and adjusting the timing, and after decades, here it is, the perfect pastry.

  She feels them with her in the kitchen; those daughters and wives and mothers, they are all with her whenever she makes the quiche. A yellowed index card with faded pencil markings passed from mother to daughter. A translucent spot on the card, an artifact from a specific moment in a sunlit kitchen when a drop of oil went astray. She feels them, just in from working the dusty fields of France, roughly milled flour dusting their hands as they work the crust. The recipe handed from grandmother to granddaughter on a blue-lined sheet of paper, rough along the edge where it was torn from the binding of a journal. A smudge in the ink where a grandmother wiped flour from the page with the side of her damp hand. Claire feels them under the coal-dust skies in the cities of a brand New World, stretching their fingers over a wooden rolling pin after a monthlong boat trip. The result of their recipe is an edible history.

  Claire cleans as she goes. She brushes excess flour from the counter into the sink with a rectangle of paper towel. Her very first job as a teenager was working the chicken station at the fast-food place a few blocks from where her mother still lives. Her extensive training in chicken instilled a need for cleanliness. The clean-as-you-go mantra only grew more entrenched in her as time passed. That job was also the inception of her taste for men in uniform. Claire hasn’t prepared or eaten chicken since she quit, but she has always dated men in uniform.

  That’s where she met Matt, her first crush. Matt lifted weights every day and was on the high school football team. Matt worked the same shifts that she did. He looked so good in his work uniform. The company logo bent so slightly around the curve of his sculpted pectoral muscle. An embroidered little man in a waiter’s uniform dashed away from Matt’s armpit and toward the cleft in his chest, carrying a burger the size of his head on a platter. Three embroidered steam lines on the logo implied the food was fresh and piping hot.

  She watched Matt for hours across the kitchen from her chicken station. His wiry forearms, cables of muscle wrapped in smooth skin, rippled when he pulled patties from the burger steamer. She watched when he spun to put an order under the heat lamp. The way the poly-cotton-blend trousers stretched tight across the muscle of his buttocks when he twisted at the waist drew her eyes like quick movements draw those of a predator.

  Claire looks at her arms. A fine dusting of flour and salt is caught in the sparse fuzz of blond hair. She stirs the ingredients in a large bowl, mixing it thoroughly and thinking about the span of time that has passed since Matt and how she looks older now even though it feels like not a week has passed. A twinge of melancholy catches in her stomach. The time has passed, she realizes. Every hour of it. Has Matt grown fat, lost his hair, or lost his tan?

  Matt’s tan was beautiful, accentuated by the tangerine glow of the heat lamp near the burger steamer. Claire pictured him, his tan in perfect contrast to the pale skin underneath his clothes. His vi
sor and shirt lay crumpled on her bedroom floor. Those poly-cotton-blend trousers, a patty-smelling grease stain on the hip from where he always wiped his hand, were draped over the corner of the nightstand. He held his boxers in one hand, the musky scent of his heat-lamp sweat clinging to the fabric, and she just watched him. She would have him stand there, turn one way and then angle the other, so she could see him differently in the light streaming through her bedroom window. The way the light played across the bends and curves of his body was entrancing.

  All she had to do was close her eyes and there he was, in uniform, placing a burger in the rack. His left forearm, the one he let hang out the car window when he drove, was a darker shade of bronze.

  They had dated. They had taken their meals and breaks together, huddled in the tiny staff area near the back door with the sound of the cooler fan running behind their talking. One summer night, when they had propped open the door to the parking lot to try to cool down the kitchen, Matt sat on a plastic crate across from her, coloring a kid’s meal place mat with crayons. It was a thick-lined map of the world. Matt shaded some African country orange.

  “What country is that?” Claire asked.

  “Don’t know.” Matt continued to color. Without looking up he asked, “Want to go there with me?”

  Claire said she did and, because of her youth, it was easy to mean it. She would have gone with him. He drove her home after work that night. They kissed in front of her house. They felt each other’s bodies through their uniforms, which still carried the smell of fast food, the scent of canola oil from the deep fryer.

  Canola oil, Claire thinks. That’s the other trick. Never use canola oil for the crust. A quarter cup of olive oil. It’s a heavier, more brutish oil, but it brings a palette with it that the blank-canvas taste of the dainty canola oil lacks. Also, the fragrance of olive oil doesn’t carry the same memories that the thin golden canola does.

  It doesn’t remind her of the string of unfulfilling men in uniform who followed Matt, nor does it remind her of how much time has passed since she felt that … thing inside her chest that she felt for Matt. She worries that the giddy, overpowering feeling of Matt has blackened, shriveled up, and blown away into dust.