After the doctor's appointment she drives straight to her mother's apartment. Hey, Noodle. She flops on the couch. I'm eight weeks pregnant, it turns out. Shyanne looks down at her for a long time. Then goes to the kitchen. The crack and hiss of a beer opening. She comes back.
Shyanne comes back into the room. Margo notices the nails. They were new. A kind of radioactive-looking yellow. I like your nails, she says.
Shyanne paces back and forth in front of the TV with her beer — something very velociraptor about the way she is stalking. I thought I did so good! You were in college! You were gonna be somebody! When Shyanne implies Mark took advantage of her, Margo leaps to her feet. Mark did not take advantage of me.
She goes to the bathroom — Eiffel Tower poster, little French soaps, the whole room Paris-themed. She washes her hands furiously. Then realises Shyanne probably desperately wants to go to Paris and probably never will. She looks in the mirror: a knockoff Shyanne, her eyes set a little too wide. Both of them with stupid faces, pretty and sweet.
She returns and lies down with her head in Shyanne's lap. Shyanne strokes her hair and tells her about the night she met Jinx — after her shift, he took her to his hotel room, he couldn't stop smiling and touching her tummy, then told her he was married. I'm really glad I met you, he said. And she realised she was glad she'd met him too.
He had those dark eyes that kind of sparkled. He was on so many steroids his traps were huge, and he didn't tan. He was so pale and big, he looked like a milk-white bull. Margo has never known her father as a wrestler. By the time she was making memories he had herniated two discs in Japan — skeletal, shaved-headed, beginning to resemble a hairless cat.
Yes, Noodle, it will ruin your life, for sure. But sometimes ruining your life is the only thing you want. Margo: I ruined your life. Not a question — she just wants her to know that she knows. Shyanne: You ruined my life so pretty, Noodle. They lie there. Shyanne skritches her scalp with her acrylic nails.
She tells Shyanne she has scheduled an abortion but doesn't think she can go. Shyanne backs off. The moment Margo leaves the house, she calls and cancels. She couldn't tell you why. It wasn't because she wanted to be a good person. She just wanted that baby. She wanted it more than she'd ever wanted anything.
She cuts out the best of the ultrasound pictures and keeps it on her bedside table. She spends hours staring at it. It is such an inadequate, ugly image — frustrating in its refusal to give her anything to hold on to. Her body is making something in secret. She holds on anyway. Faithful, waiting.
Past sixteen weeks, abortion no longer legally possible, she emails Mark to say she is keeping the baby. He doesn't write back. She had expected a lecture, a panicked phone call. Days pass. Two weeks pass. It scared her, how much this stung — she had perhaps thought that keeping the baby would force him to deal with her.
She tells Jinx she is keeping the baby. He is very relaxed. I'm looking forward to being a grandpa. Later, scared, she calls him. A woman's voice in the background — he will keep it short. What if I'm making a big mistake? He says: I can guarantee. They hang up. It is a slow, unsatisfying release of tension, like pouring out a flat beer.
Six months along. Saturday at the Goodwill with Shyanne. The strollers: brown floral fabric from another era or country — perhaps Soviet Russia — crusted with the food of some previous baby who ate, by the look of things, a lot of egg. Shyanne keeps pushing her to write to Mark. Margo refuses. Let's go look at the blue one again. The blue one's snack tray is busted. Let's go look at it again.
In the end she waits in line for thirty minutes and buys the blue one. Her head held high. Her eyes lit up by a pride that burned — she could feel it inside, its blue flame-tongues lapping. She believed then that it could make her clean, burn away every impurity, that it could save her.
And then Bodhi was born, and Margo was alone with him in her room, like she'd been locked in there and told to spin straw into gold. She slept at most two hours at a time. Her pajamas were crusted with dried milk and baby spit-up. Friends gradually stop coming. The roommates are not sympathetic.
Instead of changing out of her pajamas, she puts on her giant gray sweatshirt, straps Bodhi in his carrier on her front, and shuffles down to the Fuel Up! on the corner for an orange juice and Harvest Cheddar SunChips — a breakfast she and Becca invented called the Orange Meal.
2am. Bodhi will not stop crying. Kat the Larger bangs on the wall, then storms in, talking fast as an auctioneer. Kat the Smaller appears behind her in the doorway. It is two a.m. and you are kicking me and a three-week-old baby out of the apartment? Then: Fuck you both. She straps Bodhi to her front, jams a hat on his tiny head, and slams the door.
3am. A quiet Fullerton street. The moon is out. Lulled by the motion of walking, Bodhi falls asleep against her chest. She walks for over an hour past the rosebushes and garden gnomes in the dark. Margo felt so raw and leaking, so mortal, and yet stronger than she'd ever been. The option to throw yourself on the ground and have a good cry was gone. You had to keep going, wondering when it would be safe to go home.