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“Guys like that never know me.”
To this day, I am convinced it was Adrian.
He says he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
Chapter 55
The nursery became the only place I felt at ease. I started to read in there, sitting on the rocking chair with my feet up on the little ottoman. I had all the books associated with pregnancy: What to Expect When You’re Expecting, five different baby name books, Your Child’s First Year. Adrian left me alone when I was in there. I just closed the door and hours would go by with our house big and silent.
When I tired of the baby books, I moved the television from the kitchen into the nursery, and sat there alone in the dim blue light, watching past episodes of Cut-Throat Couture. I fantasized that I was a designer on the show, and I was host Philip Widget’s favorite contestant. In my vivid imaginings, no judge or home viewer could resist my swingy frocks. When I checked out from reality and entered my fantasy design world, I was distracted to the point of feeling almost safe. But then eventually the Cut-Throat Couture blocks would give way to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy repeats, and bored and hungry, I would come crawling back into the light. Adrian was in his studio nearly all the time, so I was still alone out there.
The truth was, there were times I thought about not going through with it. Not having the baby, I mean. Times I worried that Adrian and I were not good enough people to raise a baby, or that we were not strong enough to create a real family. I was afraid the best we could hope to be after all that had happened were three isolated, damaged individuals.
This pregnancy often seemed like a part I was playing in a play or a movie; I woke up doubting whether it was even real. But it was. I could feel it. And w
hen I looked at myself in the mirror, I was starting to see how real it was.
If I could magically undo this baby I would, but it was not that easy. The baby was coming, counting down the days until he was in my arms. How could I deny it, this nursery and my twice-canceled abortion appointments imminent proof of his arrival. And despite how I tried to distract myself, the baby stayed as focused as an arrow.
Chapter 56
I graduated from Madison in the spring of ’98 with a degree in Political Science. It took me five years because I kept changing my major. I was living in a dumpy, rodent-infested house on East Mifflin Street with six roommates. Since it cost so little to live there with rent being divided seven ways, no one was in a hurry to find a real job. Our roommate Bob was thirty-nine and working on his third doctorate. He fixed people’s inner tubes on their bicycles and sold pot out of the little shed in our backyard. Our roommates Steph, Michelle, and Bernadette had a unique three-way open relationship going for them that made Bernadette cry a lot and Michelle break a lot of dishes. Steph seemed to be the only one truly benefiting from it. Nora was quiet and nearly invisible, a blonde, ghostly girl from some place we all assumed to be Scandinavian. She sneaked around at night emptying our overflowing ashtrays and washing the dishes. The rest of us rarely saw her, but she always paid her rent on time and kept things clean and tidy, so she was a major asset. Sam was the seventh roommate.
“Sam is such a turd,” Steph warned me.
“Hmm. You’re probably right,” I said.
Nearly seven feet tall and covered in thick, matted body hair, Sam wore his microscopic granny glasses perched on the tip of his tiny button nose. He had a peculiar, plastic smell about him, not unlike the aroma of a new Barbie doll. I convinced myself that he, like everyone, had some redeeming qualities that just needed uncovering. Perhaps he was musical. Or kind to animals. Perhaps he was cool. I turned his flaws into quirky assets. His digestive issues became an endearing sign of his humanness. The enormous bags that looked like change purses under his eyes seemed, at the time, a little edgy. Like Billy Joel.
My first introduction to him came a week after I moved in, via a scrap of paper taped to the mirror of the second floor bathroom. Love Is An Idea, Not An Actual Thing. Therefore, It Does Not Exist. was scribbled in a delightfully curly script. I mistook it for girl handwriting and worried about the love triangle. “Is everything okay with Steph and Bernadette and Michelle?” I asked Bob, who was flossing his teeth at the sink next to mine.
He shook his head. “It’s Sam.”
“Sam,” I repeated. The mystery roommate I had then only heard of. As it turned out, Sam taped his feelings to the bathroom mirrors throughout the house on a regular basis. Not realizing then that he did this all the time, this particular message stuck in my head as meaningful.
“Is Sam going through a breakup?” I asked Steph the next morning at breakfast.
“No, he’s just moronic,” she said.
“Is he ever home?”
“He’s probably in his room, moping.”
“Should we invite him to share some of this oatmeal?”
“Let’s not.”
A few days later I learned a little more about him: I Accidentally Ate Half A Napkin With My Sandwich Today When I Was Having Lunch. Now I Am In A Lot of Pain. I had still not laid eyes on him but I pictured him to be handsome, noble, tortured… Like a blue eyed dog.
The following week, yet another peek into his secret mind: I Found A Coupon Book Filled With Half Offs And Buy One Get Ones In A Walgreen’s Parking Lot. Now I Am Going To Have To Spend A Lot Of Money On Things I Do Not Want.
In those first weeks, when all I knew of him was based upon scribblings on pocket-sized sheets of notebook paper, an imperfect but loveable Sam sprouted and grew in my brain. Then one day while lounging in the living room and crocheting a scarf, I heard him speak.
“Did you eat the rest of my Golden Grahams? Did you? I am positive there was half a box yesterday!” came the searing, whiny voice of a demon troll. The sound curdled and died in the big, high-ceilinged kitchen, awkwardly met with no response.
“Who is that?” I whispered to Bernadette who was lying on the floor, circling toys in an old Sears Christmas catalog.
“It’s Sam,” she said without looking up. She hesitated, her Sharpie hovering over a My Little Pony from 1986, and then she circled it and wrote maybe beside it. “You’ve never heard him before?”
