The Woman in Oil Fields by Tracy Daugherty Read Free Book Online

shift, finding fifth when I wanted third) to the hospital early in the afternoon, but Potts said it was a false alarm. “She’ll probably be in labor yet for several hours,” he told me.
    The maternity wing’s waiting room was empty except for myself and two other expectant dads who’d obviously been through the process before. They seemed relaxed, and were having a mild argument about the causes of sudden infant death syndrome.
    I found Potts again and asked him what I’d miss if I left for twenty minutes. “Go get yourself some dinner,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”
    At home I treated Meckie to half a pound of mozzarella. (I had been saving it for pizza, but Susan informed me that morning we’d have to start watching our calories – “For the baby’s sake,” she said. “We need to stay fit.”) I stood in the middle of the kitchen with the grater in my hand, and let the cheese filings fall to the floor. Meckie purred around my ankles.
    After my hot pot pie I took a walk around the block. The red lights of the radio tower at the end of our street darkened nearby roofs; the tower’s guy wires creaked. A cold lake breeze gave me goosebumps. I didn’t know my neighbors very well but I’d become intimate with their cars. Tonight the Moore’s Datsun was warm. Its windows were down – the interior smelled of French fries. The Ryersons had finally washed their station wagon.
    Yellow lights burned in windows up and down the neighborhood. Dinnertime. Squash, potatoes, beets. I felt keenly the rhythms of the families around me.
    In Fred and Alice Dorfman’s level drive I noticed a plastic baby doll, left by their daughter after play. The driveway was spotted with oil. I recalled the dream I’d had about the Fair-lane, but this coincidence didn’t startle me as much as the doll itself. Its features were lifelike and lovely. And casual . As though infancy, or birth itself, could be taken for granted – a notion so at odds with what I’d felt for months now, I became disoriented and somehow frightened.
    I lingered in the street. Then, I remember, I ran back home, switched off all the lights. I hopped into the Honda and raced without thinking through town. Video stores lined the highway. Life-sized cardboard Rambos stood in the store windows, preening. Slick muscles and guns. Several filling stations appeared to be failing along this strip of road. Owners had taped hand-lettered signs to their pumps: “Sorry, No Gas.”
    In a gravel parking lot just outside the city, teenaged boys crumpled cans of beer. They carried bowling balls in rhinestone-studded bags.
    I imagined my daughter sitting beside me in the car, her umbilical cord wrapped like a seat belt around her waist. Take a look around, Jess, this is it, I thought.
    Diesel trucks kicked up dust in my lane. To my right, the tattered husks of old drive-in movie screens. The torn white canvases on which actors used to dance, kiss, sing, flapped now in the breeze like huge cicada shells.
    Past fields of mint and wild onion I drove. Their loamy smells stung tears into my eyes. For a long time, with the radio on, I didn’t slow down or stop.
    ______
    Sometimes when you’ve been joking with a friend, then you shake hands and part, you may still have the trace of a smile on your lips – a little facial echo of a happy moment. That’s how Susan looked in her hospital bed when I walked into her room from the nursery.
    She reached out her hand to me. The space around her pillow smelled of roses (I’d bought a dozen at an all-night Safeway when I’d driven back to town) and rubbing alcohol.
    â€œHi,” I said. I kissed her eyebrows.
    â€œHave you seen her?”
    â€œI’ve seen her.”
    â€œDoes she have all her fingers and toes?”
    â€œYes, and she came with her own little American Express card.”
    Susan smiled.