A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [167]
The following morning we were eating our scoop of oatmeal with milk and sugar prepoured, a dirty slice of cantaloupe, orange juice, and cold coffee. For some reason Dyshett had already been out of the pod. No one looked up or paid any attention when she was buzzed into the day room. She sat down at her usual place at the other table. She seemed to take care to keep her distance, to avoid eye contact. After the meal she went into Sherry’s cell to play cards. I had a headache and spent most of the morning lying on my bed trying to sleep. Debbie sat on the floor crosslegged, rocking forward and back as she listened to music on her headset.
At lunch, Dyshett sauntered over to the table where I was eating and straddled the stool, her side to me, her profile obscured by her mass of braids. A woman named Carla, who was in for fraud, was explaining how her boyfriend’s credit-card scam worked for years before he got caught. I assumed that Dyshett was interested in how to go about the business. I was nibbling at my hamburger, reading my college alumni magazine, which Howard had sent me in a brown envelope along with the L. L. Bean catalog. A man named Robert J. Harrison, class of ‘67, had figured out how to grow plastic by genetically engineering a potato. The potato itself produces plastic, in the ground. One of the problematic aspects of making the technological wonder a reality is the fact that the plastic could get mixed up in the food chain. I dabbed a French fry into a puddle of ketchup, imaging our Golden Guernseys putting their heads down in their pasture to graze the perfect lush green grass, only to find that it was fake.
“How many kids you got?” Dyshett asked, turning around to face our group, looking straight at me.
“Why is everyone asking me that question?” I whined into my hamburger bun. I wished to continue thinking about the tuber that was going to be genetically engineered to grow vinyl tablecloths with or without flower patterns. I didn’t want her to know that I had been diminished by our fight, such as it was. The others thought I had come out ahead, but they were mistaken. I didn’t want her to know that there were days I couldn’t see straight. And I didn’t want her to know that I loved Howard in a way that I was sure she would never love anyone. I had a life full of marvels and she wasn’t going to get so much as a glimpse of it. He and I had mapped a course in which work and love were to go together. She wouldn’t be able to conceive of such a commitment. We had invested our lives in our children and the gifts we were giving them were for their heads and their hearts. Emma and Claire were not merely showcases for expensive jewelry.
“I don’t want to talk about them,” I said.
“Escuse me,” she said, bending her arms so that her hands, palms up, came to her shoulders.
“So, like stores had his name on their lists,” Carla was saying, in her lesson on fraud, “you know, how they do for people who write bad checks?”
I felt a violent shudder in my abdomen again, and I swallowed my hamburger as fast as I could in hopes that the bun would stanch the sobs.
“What’s their names?” Dyshett said. “You can tell me that.” She was blurry across the table from me. “A boy, you got, or what, a girl?”
“No,” I said, the awful sharpness and heft of the thing in my stomach lurching up, falling back, lurching up again. “NO,” I said. I left the table and went to my cell and I sat on the bed, doing breathing exercises meant for giving birth. I tried to focus on a speck on the wall, to feel as if I was pouring what was inside