Barnes & Noble. He pulls books off shelves and adds them to her arms one by one, urgent and delighted. Have you ever read Jack Gilbert? No? Okay, you must, it's a must. More and more. It does not occur to her at the time to wonder how he is affording all of this on a junior college professor's salary.
He loves seafood. He orders charred octopus and mussels. She chokes them down with the same worried expression as a dog who's been given a carrot. Then he tells her about a weird dream he had where he was a young girl in Meiji Japan.
After the fifth time, Mark says the sex is making him feel guilty about his wife and they should stop. They are still in her bed. He wants to keep seeing her, though. She goes to get him a glass of water. He calls after her in a little old-woman voice: I'm so thirsty, Margo. She says: All right, Granny.
One night at work she keeps throwing up a little Taco Bell in her mouth and swallowing it. Tracy, her favourite coworker, looks at her. Maybe you're pregnant! It seems so much more probable that her body is rebelling against the Taco Bell.
Four tests. All positive. Her body has been rebelling for forty-eight hours — against cheesecake, against yogurt, against a blue Gatorade she puked right back up. She felt incredibly stupid. For believing him, for having the affair with him, for having a uterus.
The first thing she does is call her mom. She cannot get the words out — just sobbing. Shyanne: Are you pregnant? Margo yell-cries: Yeah. Shyanne: Damn it! Margo: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
Then her mother takes her out for donuts. Margo eats them, and they stay down.
She tells Mark at a restaurant. There is a fig salad on the table. He says My seed is strong! in some kind of German or Viking accent. Then she says she is not having an abortion. He turns green almost instantaneously. She covers her gross fig salad with her napkin and leaves.
Outside she smells the ocean. For one moment she feels like her mother — walking haughtily on the sidewalk, like her legs are in those sheer black pantyhose, like she could slip into being someone else entirely. Then she trips on a curb. The feeling is gone. She is merely the idiot who parked too far away.
Three days of silence from Mark. She keeps checking her phone. The cord of attachment between them — snipped, dangling in space. Then the long email: he felt it best to have no further contact. You could go anywhere, you could do anything. Don't throw it all away to have a baby.
She calls Becca in New York. City noise in the background. Fucking have an abortion! Becca says. Margo is sitting in her bedroom, the laundry spilling out of the closet like her clothes are trying to crawl away. Nobody will engage with this on the terms she wants to discuss it. When they hang up she cries for twenty minutes and then goes to work.
The OB appointment. The examination table. The cheerful bald doctor who seems like the kind of man whose wife would cheat on him anyway. The transvaginal doppler — a futuristic dildo attached to a sonogram machine. She is alone. Shyanne is working.
He turns a knob on the machine and suddenly there is sound — a quiet, fast whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. That's the heartbeat. It sounds like a mechanical toy. She doesn't know why she is crying. It is completely underwhelming as a sound. He avoids using the word baby. She thinks that is kind of him, and it makes her start crying again.
He presses a button and the printer starts. The pictures dangle out of the machine on their shiny, thin strip of paper. And there he was. Her baby, looking for all the world like a tiny, deformed dove.