Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

Monica Berlin

24 Monica Berlin The Eighteenth Week The morning after they find out something is wrong, the house fills up with strangers. It’s just bad timing, really, that they’d scheduled all the maintenance and repairmen to come on the same Wednesday—after all, why not get everything taken care of at once—but when the doorbell starts ringing just after eight o’clock, just after her husband’s left for the office, she’s startled by how much care this old house needs. By noon, eleven men are working in different rooms on separate tasks. If she weren’t so devastated, she knows she could find humor here; she’d imagine an episode of I Love Lucy, the small Ricardo apartment filling with coveralls. But these high ceilings do not echo with Cuban song, and her sudden grief carries too much weight. She barely shows yet, unless you know her well enough to have noticed the slightest curve at her waist, the tightening fabric across her chest, the graying skin just below her eyes, and so when she answers the door she cannot quite say, My baby might be dying. Cannot quite say, It could be so bad I might have to wish the baby dead. Cannot announce to any of these men, I want to die. Instead she says, Of course, this way. They all know each other, have always worked together. At the screen door no one remembers not to let slam, they chat about business , their wives, plans for lunch. The plumbers joke about which of their grandfathers would have installed the toilet. The first time the door snaps shut, the carpenter announces, You just can’t get a door like this anymore. Even as he’s the one who lets it go the hardest, he promises to bring a plane tomorrow to ease the banging. These men, the eighteenth week 25 she thinks, these men know heartache. The carpenter—now sanding down plaster in the first-floor bathroom, tracking dust in and out, that carpenter, retired fifteen years from the factory, now just a shell of a building on the west side of town, the one that had boarded-up windows and doors when it packed up, the one that left on a light only so everyone could find their way out—is listening to the electrician talk about his sons in the desert, how one of their jobs is to sweep for improvisational roadside bombs, how the other stands at a checkpoint where civilians wait to pass. She thinks about this man’s children keeping track, looking carefully, and all those ordinary people fidgeting with documentation, going in and coming out, every hour of the day, their eyes focused on nothing, their heads turned down. Back in bed, pretending the house is just hers again, she turns on her left side, curled away, practicing words she isn’t sure she’ll be able to say. Words like, We lost the baby, even though it might be a lie. It might have to be more accurate to say, We had to lose the baby. But the construction is awkward, she knows. Nothing fits. She tries each phrase on, over and over, the way a month ago in the overpriced maternity boutique she had velcroed that round pillow around her waist before pulling on shirts too wide, too swingy, over her head. She couldn’t imagine how her body would fill them. She hears the men chattering to each other. One patches an old plaster wall. Another services the water heater, with its slow dribble, its too-small basin. Ashamed now, she remembers, months ago, how she had hoped for a flood so they could afford to replace everything. Who wishes for a flood? Someone changes the air filter on the furnace. Someone measures the length of the floor between pipes. If she didn’t know better, everything they said would sound like a euphemism: their plumbing problems, their troubled wiring, the sloppy mistakes made before they knew better. 26 monica berlin The day before this invasion, she and her husband had seen the bridge of the baby’s nose, the long line of its spine—perfectly arched—and she had counted its ribs. Her husband asked the sonographer questions. Between answers—Yes, two ears. Yes, two eyes. Yes—she held her breath. When they had heard its heartbeat they forgot to ask...