The Union

[Here’s the excerpt as a PDF]

Part 1: The Days

“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

Martin Silas fumbled his phone and caught the slippery device as it fell toward the ground. He caught it and fumbled it again. He slipped it into a pocket and then just as quickly pulled it back out and looked at it. The clock looked so strange. He looked at the phone, at the picture of his wife there smiling beside him. He looked so strange.

Hospital attendants in blue and green scrubs filed by in slanted patterns, some turning abruptly, gracefully, like gymnasts who’ve learned how to figure skate, spinning toward cabinets on either side of the room, the way he’d seen his wife adapt to their new kitchen in their new home.

At first she couldn’t stand the kitchen. It was too small and then, after standing silently in thought for at least ten minutes, like an actor in a brightly lit rehearsal space turning a line over in her mind, she changed her assessment: “You know, it might be too big.”

“It is big,” Martin said, looking around at the corners of the ceiling. Sandy looked at him silently. He’d begun to show discipline. Did she dislike his discipline? Again the silence, thickened with an intensity that neither of them comprehended.

“And why green?” she said. Martin looked around, focusing now on the color. His nodding head stopped and turned into a shake.

“Why green?” he said. And then sensing a moment of weakness, that his repetition might come off as mockery, he pushed the negativity into more analytic territory, modern instinct raising its snout, systemizing the bad mood. “Definitely done in the 70s. I bet this whole block,” he said, trailing off, making a vague circling motion behind him, at the windows, at the neighbors, none of whom seemed to be young enough to relate to their own blossoming predicaments and passions, all of whom were likely their age in the 1970s.

“We can repaint that,” he added.

“But repainting doesn’t improve the spacing. It’s just so clumsy” she said.

“It is,” he said. “But we’ll make it work.” She pouted and lowered her head, and he stepped forward, following the dramatic script of being married, the one that each of them had observed and subconsciously studied while growing up, the one that each of them thought they needed in order to be happy. Most importantly, it was the script they wanted to practice, so that it was ready for them when they really needed it. Martin wrapped his arms around her and she lowered her head into his chest and snuggled into his arms, he, the Human Mattress. How he loved that role.

And how he loved their new life, its small challenges leavened by their bright future, by their sense of grown-up-ness, their respect for one another, their complimentary personalities (his calm and reassuring, hers passionate and revivifying), their dreams for themselves, their commitment to civic responsibility. They’d met at a teaching conference in Southeastern Wisconsin, both new teachers, she in Spanish and he in math. They were in a group discussion at the conference, and then they chatted at the bar for long hours and then he walked her to her room and said goodnight. She’d been hoping to kiss him all night, but when she entered her room and leaned against the door, she couldn’t help feeling like a schoolgirl first discovering the strange blossoming lightness of new love, and after diving onto her king-sized bed, she replayed the day back in her mind, rolling into the cold patches of the bedspread like they were the new scenes, squeezing her eyes tight together.  And in the morning, after seeing him at breakfast and realizing that the spark was still there, she began to play the future in her mind. She pictured a house with a garden. She pictured a barn with animals of all kinds though she’d never lived or worked on a farm. It was all such ridiculous fun, to care so much about someone and to imagine that care embarking on a thousand unusual adventures. 

They lived close to one another and they began to date. Two years later, when he’d proposed, kneeling in a chilly park with sweat rolling down his forehead, she’d recalled that night they first met. “I feel like I loved you then!” she said to him. “Oh, what a night!” They expressed such unguarded joy. Martin in fact high-fived people down the street as they walked to dinner, while Sandy trailed behind him laughing away tears. 

And that joy continued when they bought a house together. Sandy didn’t like some things, but she loved the independence of homeownership and she had a husband who could fix what broke. She had visions for the backyard. They didn’t involve barn animals any more, but what they lacked in fantasy they gained in attainability, and it was all the sweeter because the visions needed to be made. They needed to be given life. And without speaking about it, Sandy realized that she wanted a child and that Martin wanted one too. Her libido seemed to magically strengthen in urgency. She began thinking about children throughout the day, obsessing over the sound of names and how they worked with their last name. “Anna Silas” she’d say in a straightforward way and then after thinking about it, she’d say, “Y’all, I’d like you to meet Anna Silas,” the name sounding strangely southern to her and out of place, and thus needing to be complicated in her mind. She thought of luxurious first names like “Samantha” and how it formed a noble echo of S’s and seemed to practically curtsy before her, unlike the snappy alliteration of Sandy Silas. “Fit for a western,” she began saying to Martin’s puzzlement. She went shopping and broke off her normal store-walking routes and strolled down aisles filled with primary-colored toys, little figurines encased in plastic, noise-making creations that she pressed with an infant’s curiosity. She showered and developed parenting strategies beneath the spout and practiced exchanges involving those strategies while driving to work. She was a good parent. Unbeknownst to Martin, she stopped taking her birth control pills. 

At first Sandy thought that he would notice she was no longer taking the pills resting on the bedside table before she shut the light off. He would wonder where the snap of the case went and the sound of the jangling water and the gulping. But he didn’t notice. Strangely, she anticipated getting pregnant immediately, wishing to assuage her guilt, to delight him with the news. But it didn’t happen. The morning following the groping and unromantic sex the previous evening did not bring about a miracle. Was she not involved enough in the sex? Must children be conceived in the good faith of true human desire? She couldn’t know. But she found herself worked into such a heart-pounding excitement the next night that Martin injured a muscle in his lower back and the pain prevented him from continuing. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, laughing. “That was unbelievable. I can’t believe I can’t—“

“What do you mean you’re sorry?” Sandy shot back. “Just shut up and do it.” Groaning through the pain and the puzzlement, Martin rolled himself into Sandy’s yawning groin and began to pulse forward while Sandy dirty-talked him past the edge. It was some of the kinkiest sex Martin had ever had with Sandy, a mixture of commands and supplication, pain and pleasure.  

And yet she still didn’t get pregnant. Hiding her frustration with this fact was turning into its own pathology, and one night, while they ate dinner together, Martin awkwardly brought up the topic of having children and Sandy wept. Martin’s spoon halted in mid-air above his soup, below his mouth. 

“It’s just a thought,” Martin said. “No pressure. We can wait.” And then Sandy told him everything, how she’d wanted to have a child so badly for a while now and hadn’t told him about it and didn’t know why, how it had affected her behavior and turned her cruel when it started so blissfully. It made no sense to her. She didn’t understand why she took the trips to the SuperWalmart in Sun Prairie to look at children’s toys. “We never even go to Walmart,” she said through her quick-rolling tears. She looked across the table at her sympathetic husband and realized that their roles had somehow reversed, that she was on the defensive, and this too baffled her. When she acknowledged that she’d thought he would have noticed her not taking her birth control pills at night, he set his spoon down and a look of inner rage flittered across his face as if the news had exploded a reactor in his brain and the fallout was now pulsing to the outer reaches of his body.

“You did what?” he said, looking up.

 “I shouldn’t have done it!” she said, realizing her attempt to share the blame had been an emotional misfire. But it was also an essential one, as she’d needed to say it aloud, to prevent it from changing her any further. “It was stupid!” she said.

“Are you pregnant?” he said. The question surprised her and she looked around for the answer, when she knew what it was. 

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t think so.” 

“You don’t think so,” he said. She shook her head. Martin jerked his chair back and stood at the table and looked down at her. She did not rise to comfort him, to meet him eye-to-eye, but rather looked up feebly at him like a small creature. He strode into the bedroom and hauled open the closet, while she sat at the dinner table in the bright lights of the lonesome room. She could hear him rattle the hangers. He emerged wearing his coat, grabbed his keys, and vanished through the door without speaking another word. He’s gone for good, Sandy thought. I have ruined everything. 

But while Martin thought nothing as he blasted out of the driveway, he knew exactly where he was driving. When he pulled into the drugstore parking lot, he stared for a moment into the lonesome bright lights that awaited him in the store, the sterile anonymity of cheap commerce, and thought of his crying wife sitting at the dinner table and felt his thoughts diverted down a corridor toward forgiveness. But not yet. 

He asked the clerk at the front of the store where the pregnancy tests were and the clerk looked at him terrified and pointed over his shoulder. 

“Where?” he said.

“Aisle 8.” 

So he went to aisle 8 and picked up two pregnancy tests and stacked them on top of each other in one hand. Then he grabbed a box of condoms. Returning to the front of the store, he virtually threw them down on the counter and pulled out his wallet, and removed a credit card. The clerk scanned the items.

“Would you like some batteries or candy?” she asked. 

“No,” he said. 

“Would you like a bag?” she asked.

“No,” he said. Then he stomped out of the store, items in hand, relieved that the performance was over. On the way home, he allowed himself a break from his rage and turned on the radio. Two women spoke on NPR and though he’d heard this radio host a hundred times before and never felt anything but mild interest, this time it was different. Rather than calming him, the radio host enraged him, as did her guest: the chummy introductions, the fake intimacy, the timbre of concern at a remove, the righteousness, the condescension, the clipped enunciation. All of it grated him.

“You don’t know anything about it,” Martin spat at his dashboard. Then he grabbed the pregnancy tests and the condoms and walked toward the house.   

The dinner had been cleaned from the tables. Martin heard the shower running and noticed the bathroom door open. He walked inside and set the pregnancy test boxes on the counter. He opened the condom box, took one out and put it in his pocket. He left the bathroom and entered the bedroom and set the box in the drawer of the nightstand by his bed. He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a drink. Then he poured another one, not thinking about his wife, but about the two women on NPR, about the clerk he’d terrified at the drugstore. It was a considerable pleasure to indulge the rage he now felt, as he’d spent a great portion of his life refining his sense of reason, losing himself in the rationality of numbers, humbly contemplating infinity. But now it was different. Now he could feel his body, hear himself breathe. It was as if he were taller. He went into their spare bedroom and rummaged through the closet looking for an old pack of cigarettes, which he promptly took outside and smoked. He poured another drink. Returning inside, the stench of the tar in his mouth and on his clothes, the boozy haze battering his mind, he glanced at the bathroom door and heard the shower. Still, he thought. Can’t stay in there forever. 

But she stayed in there long enough for Martin to stumble into the bedroom and fall upon the mattress. The swell of rage, the booze and nicotine that had floodedhis system was now shutting it down, and it collapsed him. His eyes blinked, disoriented, and he rolled to the middle of the bed where he fell asleep face-up.

He awoke dry-mouthed and blurry-eyed in the quiet strangeness of night turning into day and saw Sandy standing beside the bed in her white bathrobe. She handed him a glass of water and he drank from it, stopped, and then continued until it was gone. Then he saw a white stick held into his view beside one of the boxes he’d set on the bathroom counter. 

“Not pregnant,” she said. Then she held out another stick. “Not pregnant,” she said. 

“Oh,” he said, squinting his eyes. Then he felt his shoes being removed, along with his socks and his zipper being pulled down. He made a move to help, but she pushed his hand away. She pulled his pants off and then grabbed his underwear.

“What are you—“ he said, but stopped himself. She moved to his bedside and pulled open a condom and began to roll it on his penis. “No, you don’t have to do—“

“Shhh,” she said. Then she straddled him on the bed and opened her bathrobe to reveal her damp naked body.  She stretched her knees out on the bed and then lifted herself onto him with a soft shudder. She said upright on him for a while, barely grinding her hips into him, until she opened her mouth and lifted her hands up to her hair and arched her back. Martin couldn’t believe the way she offered herself to him, in control and not. It was as if he’d awoken in time to when they first met, the focused passion, the care, the caution taken when they were still negotiating their boundaries, the sex headed toward love, not from it. And it had helped them when they really needed it. Over the course of the next three weeks they finished the box of condoms and then neither one was using birth control. Two months later, Sandy was pregnant.  

Martin thought back to that period now as he stood in the delivery room with a gauzy mask tied around his mouth. At first he was standing nearby, holding her hand, but then when he stepped to the side in an attempt to get out of the way, he tangled himself in the IV and heard a nurse curse under her breath. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t, I, uh, how do I?” The nurse unwrapped the IV.

“Martin!” Sandy said. One of the nurses rushed over to Martin.

“Lift your leg,” the nurse said. He lifted his leg. She sighed. “The other one, sir.” He lifted the other leg and looked around to the other nurses who frowned at him.  

“Is this even hygienic?” Martin asked. 

“You can stay in the room and still see from over there. She knows you’re here.”

Martin moved over to the corner of the room and stared at his wife, who tilted her head back and breathed out in long deep breaths. 

“Have you given her the epidural?” Martin asked. None of the nurses turned to look at him, but one said “yes,” and that was all. It was a silly thing to say. He knew she’d been given one, but he wanted to show concern from afar. When the doctor returned to the room, two nurses stood nearby, while the doctor knelt on a knee. Wanting to leave to pace in the hall, but feeling like he needed to stay, Martin felt his gaze tilt up toward the television set, which hadn’t been on for hours. Even there he saw the reflections of the birthing scene and grew weary.  He looked down and saw that he was holding his phone and was ready to take a picture. Had he wanted to take a picture? He looked up at his wife as she began to push harder.

“Oh wow,” he said. 

“Hey Martin, how’s it going?” he turned to the doorway and saw Sandy’s mother smiling at him, acting like she wanted to curl her head inside. “Do you want me to join you?”

“No,” he said. 

“Are you sure?” He didn’t look back at her, but nodded his head. He was entranced by the mess of the process, the release of bodily fluids, the body rupturing to accommodate the baby’s birth.

“Oh wow,” he said, as a wave of nausea swept over him. He gulped deeply and thought, for some reason, of the ocean. When that proved unhelpful, he imagined himself lying on the beach. It was sunny. The surf was rolling in gently. Seagulls. Seagulls crying. He snapped to and heard the crying of his baby girl, Samantha Lynn Silas, born on February 6, 2011. Two nurses pulled her aside with the doctor, while one wiped Sandy’s forehead. Moments later a nurse placed Samantha into Sandy’s arms and Sandy smiled down at the tiny child she had just given birth to. 

In a daze and now sitting in a chair, Martin saw Sandy’s parents, Ruth and Fred Day, stream into the room. Ruth held her hands up to her lips and spoke something indecipherable to Martin. 

“Yeah,” Martin said finally. He realized one of the nurses was telling him he was a father. 

Once the shock had worn off, Martin spent some time alone in the room with Sandy. They kissed and lay in bed next to one another, taking turns holding Samantha in their arms.

The good will continued. On the night following Samantha’s birth, the Green Bay Packers played the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV. Sandy watched from her hospital bed for a while, but turned off the game at half time to sleep. Ruth sat beside her and read a paperback in the dim lamplight of the room, lifting her bifocaled eyes upon occasion to stare blankly at the doorway, listening as a scream of joy or a groan of disappointment filtered into a room, the kind that is easily recognized as the sound of a sporting spectacle. Martin joined Sandy’s father, Fred, and her brother, Aaron, in the main floor lobby to watch the game. His parents had also made the trip to the hospital for the game. His father had congratulated him the night before.

“Gonna watch the game tomorrow?” his dad said. Martin realized he’d forgotten about the Super Bowl.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I’ll watch it in the lobby downstairs. I don’t know.” 

“Maybe we watch it with you there,” his father had said. “See Samantha too that way.” Martin heard his mother in the background of the call. 

“We can come another time. I’m sure they’re tired.” 

“No,” his father said, now talking to her. “He says it’s fine. We can see Samantha then. She wants to see Samantha.” Martin could hear his mother as the sound of her voice came closer to his father, the soft thump of her feet and screech of strained wood, the rattle of the phone being passed off and the distortion of the new talker. She always felt the need to talk loudly at first, as if that would help her catch up with the momentum of a conversation that hadn’t involved her. 

“If you want to watch the game alone, Martin, that’s OK. Your dad when he watches those games, hahahaha!” she exhaled loudly. 

“It’s fine, mom. Sandy’s parents will be here too.”

“Oh, they’re watching it too? Is Ruth going to watch it too?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. She said she might sit with Sandy.”

“Oh, she might sit with Sandy, yes that’s nice,” she said. “I just wouldn’t want to be a bother. Dad just gets so loud during Packers games.” 

“I don’t get loud!” his father said in the background.

“You’re shouting, Joe. You’re shouting that you don’t get loud.”

“How else will Martin hear me if I don’t shout? I’m on the other side of the house?”

“It’s a Packer game, mom,” Martin said. “It’s fine. Everyone shouts.” 

“Everyone shouts, dear, during Packer games, so why make a big deal out of it?”

“Then why did you say it?” his father grumbled at his mother. She sighed.

“I’m glad the Packers are winning, Martin, but he’s going to have a heart attack, I kid you not, a football-induced heart attack. The obituary will read ‘Earl Silas died near the end of the third quarter.’”

“Agghh,” his father said in the background. “Then let’s stay home. If you can’t stand the way I watch football, then let’s stay home,” his father said, his voice trailing off into the hollow thud of the stairwell.

“Why don’t you want to go?” she called out after him. A muffled response. “He wants to go somewhere and then he doesn’t want to go somewhere,” she said to Martin. “It’s good for him to see other people. To have a conversation, imagine that. To discuss what’s going on in the world. He barely reads the newspaper anymore. I put it on the table. I circle editorials and he refuses to read them. I place the sports section on top and he refuses to read it because I’m the one who put it there. I tell him read about the protests in Bahrain, this is very important.”

“Mom,” Martin said, rubbing his forehead.

“He doesn’t need to know the differences between Syria and Yemen, Martin. I tell him that! Don’t worry about not knowing the difference between the two. You don’t live there—you get a pass. But to not even try. You know I saw on the BBC that the ancient Sumerians viewed Bahrain as an island paradise where the wise and brave were taken to enjoy eternal life. Can you believe that? It’s so romantic. You learn all these things and he’s downstairs tightening the knobs on a cabinet. For hours. If we ever sell this house, like I tell him we should, I’ll make sure to put in the advertisement that every conceivable knob is tightened. I tell him that! The house would sell, Martin. It would. He doesn’t understand that to read about a protest is not the same as protesting yourself. I read about politics all the time and I’m not in the street.” 

“Mom, I’d be glad for you to get a chance to see Samantha, but if you do come, don’t talk politics. You know Ruth and Fred are conservative. We just had a baby and the Packers are in the Super Bowl…”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.  I know Ruth and Fred are conservative.  You just had a baby and the Packers are in the Super Bowl.  Don’t worry about us.  We won’t say anything about politics.  I’ll tell your father and it’ll be fine.  He’s usually focused on the game anyway.” 

And everything was fine as they watched the game. Sports, the great equalizer, diverted everyone’s attention from their differences and focused them on their common goals, loving the newborn child and beating the Pittsburgh Steelers. A tentative camaraderie even emerged, a truce placed on past judgments. Fred’s teasing didn’t devolve into sexist condescension, Earl didn’t fall into territorial silence, Aaron, Sandy’s younger brother, didn’t make judgments about the game as if he spoke for everyone in the room, Ruth didn’t complain about the noise or give in to each of Fred’s demands (“Ruth!  Come and watch the game,” he said, patting the couch. “No,” she said. “I think I’ll go sit with Sandy.” “Awww, c’mon,” he said with a toothy grin. “Oh alright.”), and Jennifer, Martin’s mother, didn’t bring up politics. She even laughed at one of Fred’s teasing remarks, though it was directed at the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. 

“Hey, it’s the guy from that movie The Matrix. Look!”

“Huh,” Earl said, not understanding the sudden allusion to movies.

“Laurence Fishburne,” Jennifer said.   

“Yeah!” Fred said, turning to Jennifer as he ate popcorn. “Laurence Fishburne.” He laughed.

“You know, Laurence Fishburne is in the movie Apocalypse Now?” she said.

“No,” Fred said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s listed in the credits as Larry Fishburne. He was very young.”

“Ha!  Larry Fishburne. How about that?” he said, tossing popcorn into his mouth. And then he turned to Earl and said, “She’s a pretty smart lady.” Delight found its proper crossroads. Fred made people laugh, Jennifer’s intelligence was openly acknowledged, and the compliment was directed to Earl, delivering an unspoken conversation in the look they exchanged. Jennifer even delighted in the harmless subversiveness of it all, the racial undercurrent of the jibe, the flirtatious way Fred tossed the popcorn into his mouth while looking at her. Aaron and Martin sat silently on the couches, fixated on the game. For such a large space in the lobby, they were surprised that so few people were there watching. The atmosphere was relaxed in its familial comfort and exhilarated in its sporting appeal, complete with shots of adrenaline, disappointments, and finally triumph. Ruth even made her way down toward the end of the game to join in the merriment. Sandy was sleeping she said and so was Samantha. The night and their lives had never felt closer or more complete. Promises were made as the families departed, handshakes exchanged, hugs given, plans were spoken of in the near-term, warmly closing the gap of their departure. Holiday brainstorms raged with new inspiration as Martin and Sandy returned home with their newborn daughter.