Going Peacefully
While my wife got her hair cut, I went across the mall to a popular children’s clothing store to choose an outfit for a newborn boy. Semantically, it was incorrect though, because the boy wasn’t actually newborn yet. He was currently unborn and residing in the abdomen of Maddie in the HR department of my office. Her husband was a lawyer and there was no pressure for Maddie to work, something I could never hope to achieve for my wife.
My wife and I had agreed before we got married that we wouldn’t have children. I went to a urologist a few months before the wedding, and he and I talked about our favorite restaurants in town while he breached my ball sack and snipped my vas deferens. My wife picked me up after the procedure, and with a bag of ice splayed across my lap, we tried one of the restaurants the urologist had suggested. Those were happy times, when what I looked forward to the most was the elimination of condoms from our sex life.
My mother would have been disappointed about our decision not to have children. But she was dead, and that made it much harder to be disappointed about things. She’d died while I was in college. I was twenty years old at the time, and I tried not to think about my mother at all. Her many attempts to meet someone new, someone to take care of her, sent her to trivia nights at bars and guided tours through American cities and lunches at museum cafeterias. She wanted to be loved and she wanted to devote the entirety of her time and energy to someone other than herself. My mother died alone in her bed on a cruise ship in a room with no window even though I’d encouraged her to upgrade. Passing from the pitch black of her room to the pitch black of the unknown without noticing the transition. Apparently, people died on cruise ships all the time. They have a department for it. “Your mother went peacefully,” a voice too young to know said to me over the phone from somewhere in the world I would never see. But the joke was on the cruise lines. My mother had never known a peaceful day in her life.
As I looked at brightly-colored newborn outfits replete with repeating sequences of cartoon animals and extremely friendly-looking aliens, it was clear to me that my mother would have preferred for me to marry someone like Maddie. She wasn’t beautiful or anything as simple as that. But she wasn’t complex either. Maddie contained joy, and I had never been drawn to that. Now though, Maddie’s ability to look forward to the next day, to be excited to share that with others, including an unborn child who she hefted around inside her body like a metaphor of her future, was supremely alluring to me. I felt compelled to bring a gift that would be the most cherished. One Maddie would be unable to stop thinking about. Once her husband, Steven the Lawyer, had cooed quietly over the presents and then deleted them from his mind, he’d kiss Maddie on the head and leave the house to meet with a client. Maddie would linger in the new nursery, the walls painted the winning color from a poll she’d sent to all employees in an email that had seemingly bothered no one.
I could see her there as if I’d been invited.
The light from the lamp in the shape of a football illuminating the wall color I had chosen, just like in the picture she’d emailed the office after she and Steven the Lawyer had finished painting. She would pick up the outfit I’d purchased for her future son, and she’d rub it on her cheek to relish the softness. Then she’d catch a faint whiff. A droplet of my sweat. A trace of the cologne my wife had given me for our second anniversary, and Maddie would inhale a little harder. Trying to find it again. A brief sense of longing. Then she would hold the outfit in front of her to admire it. She’d picture her currently unborn son wearing it. Maybe even caress her swollen belly.
This image was very clear to me as I stood there in the popular children’s clothing store. I could perfectly visualize the outfit she was holding, so that was the outfit I purchased. I put it in a plastic bag, hesitant to let my wife see it, and I returned to the salon to find that my wife had cut her hair to look like my mother.
Not long after we got married, my wife found an old album with my baby pictures. My mother and father appeared in many of them, though they were both dead now. Alcohol proved too much for my father to handle and he was lucky he didn’t take anyone out with him when his life came to an end on an unseasonably snowy road. His loss didn’t register much at the time and didn’t register at all once I reached adulthood. But in the pictures, my mother looked alive. It was hard to imagine her timeline had come to an end.
My wife had lingered on her. Brushed her thumb across my mother’s cheek as my mother smiled at someone out of frame. “She’s lovely,” my wife had said. She’d picked her favorite picture and had it framed for me as a gift. But I didn’t want a picture of my mother in our house. This framed photograph was in fact something my wife very much wanted, and she’d hung it at the end of the hall. The frame was stark white, and the picture was faded, but my mother’s neediness was there, palpable in our house now. I tried to brush against it a few times with my shoulder, hoping it would fall to the floor and break. An accident. But my mother’s image clutched to the wall in the same way she’d clutched the belief someone would make her happy one day. That someone would take that burden for her.
“You have the haircut from that picture,” I said as we lay in bed that night after the mall.
“Which picture?” my wife said, innocently.
“In the hall. My mother.”
My wife brought her hands to both sides of her head, as if patting her hair allowed her to see it. “I didn’t think of it that way, but I suppose it’s similar. Could be passing it every day put it in my mind. Subconscious. Did you find a baby gift?”
“No,” I said. “I just got a gift card.”
Because we were both still awake for once, I asked if she wanted to have sex.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation.
I turned off the light before commencing.
The outfit was a beautiful deep seafoam green. The shirt had a white collar that brought to mind sailors or Shirley Temple. Emblazoned on the front in a bold puffy material was the image of a whale, the same color white as the collar. The whole shirt was the size of a paperback book. The trousers had legs about the length of my hand, and the seafoam green was only broken by a white tie around the waist. Lying in bed, post coitus, my wife and I both content knowing that no child could be produced in our act, I pictured myself waking in the morning and opening my closet. There was the outfit, hanging among my button-down work shirts and my wife’s muted blouses. But it was no longer sized for a newborn. I could tell as I stood there in my boxers, my wife still asleep in the bed with her mouth slightly open, that it would fit me perfectly. I brushed the back of my hand across the puffy whale, and it sent a thrill up my arm and into my neck. My body flushed. I buried my hands in the lush material and hoisted it from the closet. I sat at the edge of the bed, careful not to wake my wife, and first pulled the shirt over my head. It whispered across my skin as it settled perfectly into place. The collar fluttered against my chin. I then pulled on the trousers and stood so I could confidently tie the drawstring around my waist. It was a glorious moment, a completion. I shivered with pride.
I looked over at my sleeping wife, her hair still visible in the pale light from the window. My mother’s hair. I wonder if this was how they found my mother in her bed on that cruise all those years ago. Lying silently on her back, her hair settled on her pillow. Just as the young man from the death department had told me: She’d gone peacefully. But that wasn’t exactly it though, was it? Unknowing would be more accurate. It wasn’t peaceful. It was a surprise attack.
It was hard to look at my wife, lying there like that.
The baby shower happened at exactly 3pm the next day. Everything happened exactly on time in our office. Maddie walked into the breakroom and smiled at everyone as if she hadn’t expected to see us gathered there even though she had been instrumental in arranging it. She would never know I didn’t bring anything. It would mean nothing to her. She had no idea what my sweat or cologne smelled like. We had never spoken outside of email.
Another problem with the haircut was that it was a perfect encapsulation of my mother from the time I was in elementary school. After my father had died. When I was out on the baseball field as a child, unable to tie my own shoes, which my mother attributed to grief over my father’s death but I knew was laziness, that was the haircut that left the small bleachers and met me on the field. That was the haircut I looked down on as my mother’s long fingers created two bows with laces on my cleats and pulled it tight. That was the haircut that filled me with shame. The haircut from the time when I was the sole receptacle for my mother’s affections. Her attentiveness. Her involvement in every classroom activity. Every morning I wanted to get away from her. Every afternoon I didn’t want to discover her waiting beyond the school doors where no other parent waited. Alone and anxious, peering into the school to make sure I was still alive. That I was going to rejoin her. My mother’s presence had begun to fill me with dread. I tortured her sometimes. Hiding in the bathroom until all the other students had left, my mother quivering at the bottom of the stairs, looking around, eyes wild. The haircut. The haircut. The haircut.
“I took a good look at the picture this morning,” my wife said after work a few weeks after that fateful day at the mall, accosting me on the way to the shower. Her hair had grown out a little. It softened the memories it had exhumed. “My hair doesn’t look anything like your mother. You’re projecting.”
“If it’s not exact, it’s exact adjacent.”
“Walk down the hall,” she said. “Go down there and really look at it. Then try to explain to me why you’re avoiding me.”
My wife waited a moment to see if I was planning to walk to the framed picture at the end of the hall as she had commanded. When I didn’t, she went into the bathroom and shut the door and that ruined my plans to take a shower.
I went to our room instead. Our bed was unmade. After a year in this house, neither of us had taken up the mantle of bed maker. It seemed wrong suddenly now. Why hadn’t we discussed who was in charge of making the bed every morning? Why wasn’t there a schedule? I opened the closet as if I was going to find the outfit there waiting for me. A sense of hope and elation. But it was only my work shirts and my wife’s blouses intermixed, huddled together for warmth. Some of the sleeves intertwined.
I returned to the bathroom and gently opened the door. My wife sat on the edge of the tub. The haircut suited her of course. That’s why she’d gotten it. It was bushy, the back slightly longer than the front, like she was going to join a hockey team. It framed her thin face perfectly.
“You look nice,” I said and sat next to her.
She leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, and rested her chin on her upturned hand. I almost recoiled. That was the pose. It was exactly as my mother had looked the night my father had died. The moment she transferred her unyielding need from him to me. The moment I began to matter too much. More than I ever wanted to.
I put my arm around my wife but averted my gaze from the mirror.
“Who was the first to say they didn’t want to have children?” she asked.
“You,” I said. Of course it was her.
“I thought it was you,” she said.
“Have you changed your mind?”
“No,” she said. Blunt.
“Me either,” I said.
My wife didn’t move. Not one single muscle.
“So why are we upset?” I said.
She didn’t answer me.
I have never told my wife about the pregnant girlfriend in high school. It was solely for my mother to know and of course, she would never know anything again. I was only fifteen when I had confessed, and my mother hadn’t given me a lecture on using condoms or practicing abstinence or how I was too young to be a father. She was like a sun about to supernova.
“I’m going to smother that child,” she said. “With love.”
But all I had heard was smother. And I believed her.
When the baby died before reaching the second trimester, my girlfriend blamed me for it. She said it was because I didn’t want the child, that I already resented it. I had murdered our child with my indifference.
It was a crushing blow to my mother who until that moment hadn’t met my girlfriend. Now she’d lost the grandchild and her future daughter-in-law. But how could she not know? She must have known. That none of it was true. How could it be? I had no time away from my mother to meet a girl or consummate a relationship. My mother surely knew that. But she wanted to believe that story. Her belief was so strong that she let me create a child out of nothing. And then let it die.
After our conversation in the bathroom, my wife and I independently decided we would act as if everything was back to normal. We tried to remain in each other’s eyesight when we could, instead of ducking into the nearest room and closing the door. We ate dinner together again. We kissed upon departure. What we hadn’t done was appear together in public. The night of her firm’s office party, I told her I’d meet her there so I could have my own car. In case I needed to flee. I manufactured a reason to remain at work for an extra hour. I brought the outfit with me, tucked in my briefcase among document folders and legal-sized notebooks. After everyone had left, I pulled it out and placed it on the desk. I ran my fingers around the edge as if I was making a chalk outline after a murder. I put my head down and pressed my cheek against the whale. I hoped that whatever power it contained would transfer to me so I could get through the next few hours of my wife’s office party.
I drove across town and parked in the underground garage. I made sure my briefcase was locked, and I jammed it under the passenger seat so no one could see it. I was suddenly extremely nervous that someone would break into the car and take the briefcase, unaware that they would be acquiring the outfit too. I couldn’t let the outfit get away from me.
After testing the view through multiple windows to see if the briefcase was visible and confirming that it was completely hidden, I decided to take the stairwell up the three floors to my wife’s firm, rather than the elevator. And that’s how I saw the touch.
My wife was talking to a woman, positioned in what I think was an attempt to watch the elevator. To look for me. The woman had her back to the elevator and as I exited the stairwell, I watched her touch my wife on the elbow in a way that said she had touched that elbow before. And perhaps other places.
Before my wife noticed me, I immediately turned around and left.
I entered our empty house clutching my briefcase. Everything was dark and silent, as if everyone in the world had suddenly disappeared and I was the only person left. I moved toward our bedroom, careful not to look down the hall at the framed picture of my mother. I unlocked my briefcase and extracted the outfit. The moment I had it in my hands, I felt immediately better. At peace with my thoughts. Everything was mere curiosity now. Did that woman like the haircut? Had my wife cut it for her instead of me?
Before the thought had truly coalesced into an idea, I was unbuttoning my work shirt and tossing it to the ground. Then I undid my belt and let my trousers fall. I pulled off my boxers, my skin puckering on the parts of me that didn’t get much time in the open. I pushed my briefcase off the bed, and my papers and notebooks splashed to the floor. I lay down gently on my back, the outfit clutched in my right hand. I took a few deep breaths, and then I placed the shirt on my chest. The material felt soft against my breast. I placed the small trousers just under my belly button, the soft mound of my belly rising above it.
I closed my eyes and pondered how much of me remained uncovered. The outfit barely shielded any of me from the world. I was pale and vulnerable and everything that was available to see was lacking depth. I was a disappointing creature in a disappointing world with absolutely nothing that made me feel safe.
The door to the room opened then. A soft click. A whoosh of displaced air. I didn’t open my eyes. It was easy to imagine my wife there, looking down at me. But it was also just as easy to picture my mother.
The door closed, and I was left alone again.
I got up. The outfit slipping off me and onto the unmade bed. With my eyes still closed, I began pulling at the tiny shirt. Rearranging the molecules. Stretching it beyond what physics would allow. I pulled the shirt over my head and it sunk down across my frame, covering my top half completely. Then I yanked the legs of the trousers, pliable now, willing them into the desired shape. I stood and placed one leg in at a time inside. The fabric brushed against my thighs as I pulled the drawstring tight. I felt the weight of the whale on my chest. I finally opened my eyes but I didn’t look down. I didn’t want anything to ruin this moment.
I slipped out of the room and saw a sliver of light coming from under the bathroom door. My wife wasn’t ready to see me like this. Instead, I looked down the hall. My mother’s framed picture barely visible in the twilight.
I moved slowly toward the picture, my mother’s face materializing out of the gloom. The haircut, of course, was just as my wife had said. Barely a passing resemblance. I had transposed my wife’s current haircut into my memories of my mother. Something clanked in the bathroom behind me. My wife grunted. Then the unmistakable sound of hair clippers connecting with scalp. I wanted to turn back, to stop her. But I was close enough now to the picture, closer than I’d been in a long time, and I noticed something I’d never seen before. Down at the bottom of the frame. It was me. A tiny baby. Not knowing what lay ahead for me. Most of me was cut off, lost forever in a past never to be recovered. I leaned closer and my breath sent the frame tumbling to the floor. The light from the bathroom illuminated the picture, that nascent image of me. But it was clearer now. I no longer seemed unaware. Down there, hovering at the bottom of the frame, I could see a look of sheer terror on my face amid the faintest hint of seafoam green.
Josh Denslow (@josh_is_lanky) is the author of Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books), Super Normal (Stillhouse Press), and the upcoming collection Magic Can’t Save Us (UNO Press). His most recent short stories have appeared in Electric Literature’s The Commuter, The Rumpus, and Short Story, Long, among others. He is the Email Marketing Manager for Bookshop.org, and he has read and edited for SmokeLong Quarterly for over a decade. He currently lives in Barcelona.