If You're Not Yet Like Me by Edan Lepucki Read Free Book Online

some miracle, you’ll be born knowing all of this, and you won’t come to me later, and ask for the truth. Who knows what I’ll tell you when you’re older. This could be the confession before the deception.
    N owadays, my stomach is round, stretched taut as a drum. Small blue veins map the blood I pump to you. I have to pee eight times an hour. I barely sleep. My labia feels fat. I suppose the gift of my new full breasts must be offset somehow.
    Yesterday, my parents came over to clear out my kitchen so that the exterminators can get rid of my roach problem. All dishes and food must be removed, and the counters must be draped with newspaper. There is still that one empty cupboard, which I cleaned out months ago, for the future.
    My mother says my bedroom is large enough for the crib she bought, thank goodness. We agree I can shine this on—my one-bedroom, freelance situation—for a year or two. “And then you’ll have to do something,” she said. She asked again who the father was.
    I auditioned answers. I could have said, “You don’t want to know.” Or, “The father was a dick.” I closed my eyes, as if that might help.
    “The father—” I imagined saying, “he’s invisible.”
    I pressed my eyelids and saw the universe. I heard the cars passing on the street outside. The clock on the kitchen wall counted off the seconds.
    My mother repeated her question.
    I opened my eyes.

I AM THE
LION
NOW

M argaret took a bath. The tub, like all tubs in apartments worth living in, was grimy. She had scrubbed it many times but the porcelain remained gray and streaked with rust around the drain. She didn’t mind. She also kissed dogs on the mouth, didn’t wash her fruit. Let the squeamish suffer their fear, let them live without really living. Margaret was safe in her risk-taking.
    In the kitchen, Toby baked a cake, his second: the first one had burned. Margaret had assumed he’d forgotten to turn on the timer, but this was deliberate. He’d wanted to have sex, more than he wanted to eat cake, and he knew that if the timer went off in the middle, they would stop to handle it. They were married, and passion was not greater than cake. But they didn’t end up having sex (because there were dishes to wash, because they were tired—they were always tired now that the baby was on the way), and the cake burned anyway. Toby felt silly, and a little disappointed by his carelessness.
    The average married couple in Los Angeles has sex once a week. The number increases among newlyweds, and decreases considerably among those with children. Margaret and Toby, married four years, together for six, were not doing badly. Margaret kept a tally of their lovemaking in her checkbook. Toby wasn’t aware of the tally, wasn’t aware that their average was higher than the norm during the fall and lower in the summer, bikini wax or not. Heat wasn’t sexy. Margaret sometimes imagined a future biographer, their biographer, celebrating the discovery of this diligent record. She didn’t realize that no one was recording the more important matters. Toby’s baking, for instance. That he was making a second cake two hours after the first, simply because his wife had a craving.
    In the bathroom, a candle next to the sink glowed weakly, a gesture of light. Margaret lay in the tub with her eyes closed; the book she had brought into the room admonished nearby. It was a turgid novel, too challenging to read in water. Margaret longed for a tabloid—all those pregnant actresses. But I am worth it, whispered the book.
    Because the smell of burnt food lingers, Toby had opened the front door and all the windows. As he’d begun to stir the second batch of dry ingredients, Margaret had said, “I feel fat. I’m going to take a bath.”
    “You’re not fat,” Toby said. “You’re pregnant.”
    “My arms aren’t,” she said.
    Margaret was three and a half months along; she’d recently purchased a maternity wardrobe, even though she didn’t