'Yesterday Norma asked the waitress how long it took her to get pregnant and the waitress said, “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes?”'
Dirty Norma by Samantha Hunt
In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma assembles the chicken bones on her plate into an arrow pointing at her stomach. Once, in a magazine, she'd seen a picture of a hen split open down the breast, unzipped like a parka, and inside there was a chain of eggs, rubbery and small as tapioca pudding. Nothing like the basket of fried chicken Norma has just finished eating but sickening all the same.
The waitress is talking. "If it's all the same to you I'll--"
"It's never all the same." Norma is thinking of the eggs. "It changes a tiny bit every time."
But the waitress keeps on. "--just close out your check cause we're switching shifts."
Dead Elm Street is not a dead end street but Norma imagines a couple of concrete barriers that could cut Dead Elm in half creating a North Dead Elm and a South Dead Elm, two streets instead of one. Inconvenient for getting across town but satisfying. Dead Elm, the dead end. Procreation by division just like the amoebae.
"Wait. Do you have any walnuts?" Norma asks the waitress.
"Walnuts?"
"Walnuts," Norma confirms.
"No. No walnuts, no pecans, no filberts. No nuts." And asks again, "Walnuts?"
"They get you pregnant."
"Walnuts get you pregnant?"
"I read it on the internet."
"I doubt it." She's a very pretty waitress but all of her good looks didn't make her a genius so Norma wonders what the hell she might know about the health benefits of walnuts.
Norma slides out of the booth.
The ladies room's stalls are made of aluminum and Norma rests her head against this coolness while she pees. In the stall wall she can see a distorted reflection of herself. The dark chestnut hair dye she'd tried last week makes every minor bump and blemish on her pale face bright red, raw as a Goth girl.
Yesterday Norma asked the waitress how long it took her to get pregnant and the waitress said, "I don't know. Fifteen minutes?"
"No. I mean how many times did you have to try?"
And she said, "Try? What do you mean, honey?"
The waitress has three kids. She doesn't seem to like any of them.
Norma's been trying to get pregnant for four years.
"I'm ovulating," she'll tell Ted while staring at the bedroom carpet, humiliated. And Ted groans from a low place in his belly where he stores the worst pains as if to say any chore would be preferable, taking out the garbage, vacuuming the basement, regrouting the tub. Please.
Norma rests her forehead on the stall wall. GIVE ME A CALL. 1-800-FUCKIN'A in marker. She zips up her pants. She dials the number on her mobile phone.
"Hello?"
"Hi. 1-800-FUCKIN'A?"
"No, I'm sorry. You've reached 1-800-DUBL-INC. Doubles Incorporated, providing goods and services for the Procreation by Division Industries."
"Procreation by division?"
"Yeah. You know. Like the amoebae."
On the way home Norma walks past a number of construction sites and some old farms where the grass grows as high as Norma's waist. Strip malls, grasshoppers, other people multiply. Norma bites her nails and spits the bits into the rounded and ripe fields.
A rustling speeds up from behind her like an enormous snake. She turns. A woman is pedaling furiously on a tiny BMX bike with florescent green tires, sticking her chin out in front of herself as if she were an ape. The blades of her cheekbones have been accentuated by two brutish swaths of rouge. The woman wears her dark hair feathered back with a bandana rolled and tied across her forehead as if nothing has changed since 1981. She looks tough, dirty, terrified and perhaps even a little bit retarded. Her eyes are watery and distracted as an addict's.
Though they are the only two people on the road, the woman stares straight ahead. She clenches her lips around a cigarette, one hand on the handlebars. She doesn't blink and in a fast breeze she is gone.
"Creepy." But creepy like a humongous pile of insects crawling all over each other that Norma would want to poke at with a long stick.
A few summers back Norma and Ted moved into a development called Rancho de Caza. It was cheap and Ted promised they wouldn't spend their whole lives living in a development. Rancho de Caza was not a gated community but then there was a spate of burglaries and after a thirty-eight year old mother from Lilac Lane was lashed to a kitchen chair with duct tape and thrown into her swimming pool, the board of Rancho de Caza changed their minds. Even though the woman lived. Now Norma must stand in front of the guard house, wave to the man inside and then wait while he swings open two white, wrought iron gates big enough for an eighteen wheeler. The gates make Norma feel like a mouse entering a giant's city. They close behind her and she scurries down Day Lily Street before taking a left on Daffodil.
Caza. What a bunch of idiots.
At home she checks the messages. "Hi Norm, are you there? Are you there? I guess you're not there." Outside an airplane passes overhead making a shadow on her back lawn. She watches it go and the house is quiet again.
Earlier she'd been surfing the Web, looking at a TTC -- Trying to Conceive -- chat room. Women are mean to each other in the TTC rooms. Norma will type in, "Good luck," but she means it more like, "Good luck. Fat chance. You're too old. Much older than me. You're never going to have a baby."
There's a few strings streaming in front of her: HSGs, D&Cs, OPKs and BBTs. There is also a box you can click to send someone who is TTC some Baby Dust. It's a virtual gift that arrives over email. Norma had already sent herself some. Storks, smiley faces, pink and blue bits of electronic confetti. It didn't work.
She looks away from her computer into the back yard. A BMX bicycle with fluorescent green tires, one wheel spinning slowly in the breeze. Norma steps out the back slider barefoot, her toes in the warm grass. No one's there. She looks up through the branches of the sycamore tree. Nothing. Norma rights her neck.
And there she is. Standing no more than a narrow foot away. The woman with the addict eyes stares at Norma. She looks hungry. Tiny capillary lines of sweaty grit swoop across her neck like a tidal shore. Her fingernails are rimmed with dirt as if she crawled out of a grave. A dark birthmark on the woman's collarbone is so large it looks as if it could be the mothership, the epicenter of all this dirt. The woman is missing a tooth. This dark hole in the her mouth sucks in all of Norma's attention.
There is a power to her filth.
"You scared me." Norma keeps her voice calm and friendly the way one might with a cruel dog. "You scared me," she repeats herself.
The woman is breathing heavily. "What's your name again?" the woman asks as if Norma had already volunteered this information.
And Norma, hypnotized by the missing tooth, tells her. "Norma," she says. "What's yours?"
"Norma."
"No. What's your name?"
"Norma. Are you deaf?"
"That's my name."
"Well. It's my name also," Dirty Norma says.
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Samantha Hunt's stories have been published in McSweeney's and the New Yorker. Her latest novel, The Seas, is published by Corsair.
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Friday, 25 June, 2010
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